This volume translates the poems of Giulio Cesare Croce: a sixteenth-century street poet and singer who plied his trade on the bustling streets of Bologna. Though widely popular in his time, Croce’s work has been largely neglected by modern scholarship, and his poems remain largely untranslated into English.
This volume translates the poems of Giulio Cesare Croce: a sixteenth-century street poet and singer who plied his trade on the bustling streets of Bologna. Though widely popular in his time, Croce’s work has been largely neglected by modern scholarship, and his poems remain largely untranslated into English—despite their frequent reference by Italian academics who recognize their value as vivid windows into Early Modern life.
This collection remedies this absence by providing the first English translation for many of Croce’s poems, bringing out (rather than obscuring) their uncouth and bawdy nature. It argues for the use of Croce’s poems within historical inquiry, demonstrating their unique contribution to our understanding of Early Modern Italy. His poems illuminate a genre often forgotten due to its oral and ephemeral nature and reveal the lived experiences of the pre-modern non-elite, displaying the flavor and character of their daily lives.
Organized into four thematic chapters, the translated poems are accompanied by contextual introductions that explore various dimensions of pre-modern life. Explanatory footnotes further situate Croce’s works within their literary and historical context, making the collection accessible to scholars, students, and general readers interested in Early Modern Italian history and popular literature.
Croces Bologna
Introduction
1: City Life: the Good, the Bad, and the In-Between
The Most Pleasing Mascherate
A Praise and Condemnation of Prison
The Lamentation of the Paupers who Rent a Home and Must Pay Rent
The Lamentation of the Drunks
Predictions and a Stupendous and Marvellous Almanac About the Present Year
2: Dalla Campagna alla Città: The Margins of Urban and Rural Life in Early
Modern Italy
A Debate between Wheat Bread and Bean Bread for Superiority
The Lamentation of the Harvesters
The Lamentation of the Bandits
3: Fame, Freddo: Calamities in Early Modern Italy
The Most Solemn Triumph of Abundance
Lamentation For the Poverty Caused by the Extreme Cold
Banquet of the Ill-Fed
The Despair of the Failed Carnival
4: The Comedy and Contradictions of Hierarchy
Description of the Life of Giulio Cesare Croce
The Cleverest Tricks of Bertoldo
The Greatness of Poverty
The Song of the Porcellina
Appendix
Currencies
Original Texts
Bibliography
Index
Lena Breda is a doctoral student in history at the University of Oxford. Lena was a 2021 Fulbright Scholar to Bologna, Italy and received her Masters in Early Modern History from the University of Cambridge in 2022. She received a B.A. in History with a Minor in Italian Language and Culture from the University of Chicago in 2020. Lena studies early modern Italy with a focus on inequality, urban life, famine, and political communication across socio-economic strata.
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