In order to find the most beautiful dialect ever spoken in Italy, they had to reach back in time two hundred years to fourteenth-century Florence. What this congress decided would henceforth be considered proper Italian was the personal language of the great Florentine poet Dante Alighieri. When Dante published his Divine Comedy back in 1321, detailing a visionary progression through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, he'd shocked the literate world by not writing in Latin. He felt that Latin was a corrupted, elitist language, and that the use of it in serious prose had "turned literature into a harlot" by making universal narrative into something that could only be bought with money, through the privilege of an aristocratic education. Instead, Dante turned back to the streets, picking up the real Florentine language spoken by the residents of his city (who included such luminous contemporaries as Boccaccio and Petrarch) and using that language to tell his tale.

为了找到意大利最美的方言，他们必须回溯到两百年前，14 世纪的佛罗伦萨。这个集会达成决定：往后被认为是正统意大利语的语言，正是佛罗伦萨大诗人但丁的个人语言。早在1321年，但丁出版《神曲》，详述穿越地狱、炼狱及天堂的想象过程；其不以拉丁文书写作的立场，震惊了文学界。他觉得拉丁文是一种讹误的精英语言，用之于严肃的散文上时，让普遍的叙述转变成必须经由贵族教育特权才能阅读，也就是必须用钱才能买得到的东西，“使文学成为妓女”。但丁转而回到街头巷尾，采撷他的城市居民们（包括同时代的杰出人物薄伽丘与佩托拉克）所使用的真实的佛罗伦萨语，以这种语言来讲述他的故事。

He wrote his masterpiece in what he called dolce stil nuovo, the "sweet new style" of the vernacular, and he shaped that vernacular even as he was writing it, affecting it as personally as Shakespeare would someday affect Elizabethan English. For a group of nationalist intellectuals much later in history to have sat down and decided that Dante's Italian would now be the official language of Italy would be very much as if a group of Oxford dons had sat down one day in the early nineteenth century and decided that—from this point forward—everybody in England was going to speak pure Shakespeare. And it actually worked.

他使用他所称具有“dolce stil nuovo”（甜蜜新风格）特质的方言，来书写他的杰作，而即便在书写之时，他也在塑造这种方言，亲自影响它，如同莎士比亚有朝一日也将影响伊莉莎白时代的英语一般。经过漫长的历史以后，一群民族主义知识分子坐下来决定，让但丁的意大利语言成为意大利的官方语言，这就像一群牛津研究员在19 世纪初的某一天坐下来决定，从今以后，让英国每个人说纯粹的莎士比亚语。而他们确实办到了。

The Italian we speak today, therefore, is not Roman or Venetian (though these were the powerful military and merchant cities) nor even really entirely Florentine. Essentially, it is Dantean. No other European language has such an artistic pedigree. And perhaps no language was ever more perfectly ordained to express human emotions than this four-teenth-century Florentine Italian, as embellished by one of Western civilization's greatest poets. Dante wrote his Divine Comedy in terza rima, triple rhyme, a chain of rhymes with each rhyme repeating three times every five lines, giving his pretty Florentine vernacular what scholars call "a cascading rhythm"—a rhythm which still lives in the tumbling, poetic cadences spoken by Italian cabdrivers and butchers and government administrators even today. The last line of the Divine Comedy, in which Dante is faced with the vision of God Himself, is a sentiment that is still easily understandable by anyone familiar with so-called modern Italian. Dante writes that God is not merely a blinding vision of glorious light, but that He is, most of all, l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle . . .

因此今日的意大利语，并非罗马语或威尼斯语（尽管它们是强大的军事商业城市），甚至不尽然是佛罗伦萨语。基本上是“但丁语 ”。没有别的欧洲语言具有如此风雅的血统。或许没有任何语言可以比这个由西方文明的伟大诗人之一加以修饰的14世纪佛罗伦萨意大利语，更天经地义地表达出人类的喜怒哀乐。但丁以“三韵体 ”（terza rima）书写《神曲》，每个韵脚每五行重复三次的连环韵诗，赋予他那漂亮的佛罗伦萨方言某种学者所谓的“层叠韵律”——此种韵律依然存在于今天的意大利计程车司机、屠夫、政府官员所说的抑扬顿挫的声调当中《神曲 》的最后一行——但丁看见上帝本尊——所表达的感情，任何熟悉所谓现代意大利语的人都能很容易理解。但丁写道，上帝不仅是令人目眩的光辉景象，最重要的是，他是 “I'amor  che move il sole e l'altre stele”……

"The love that moves the sun and the other stars."

“是爱也，动太阳而移群星。”

So it's really no wonder that I want so desperately to learn this language.

Eat, Pray, Love

难怪我这么死命想学这种语言。