Problemi d'interpretazione nel corpus di Ventura Monachi

The present essay provides the elucidation of some particularly difficult passages in the sonnets of the florentine poet Ventura Monachi and his correspondent Giovanni di Lambertuccio Frescobaldi. The passages exemplify syntactic structures and lexical forms whose interpretation requires either recourse to Latin or a thorough analysis of the grammatical and semantic possibilities of the Italian language of the 14th century. In the last example, in which issues regarding the legitimacy of the assonant rhyme are also dealt with, the literary tradition that the sonnets are related to also comes into play in order to establish the critical text.