CENTRAL AND SOUTHERN ITALY AND SICILY 151

lover protests his faithfulness and sends his heart. Or he is angry
or jealous or glad to end a base affection:

Dear God, good day,

now all my love has fled away;

or he scorns the advances of an amorous old hag. Religion and
proverbial wisdom, misfortune, imprisonment, satire, civic rivalry,
and other topics find expression in these songs; and in verses of
looser structure we find the usual assortment of games, lullabies,
prayers, riddles, and 'airs' (arii).

The 'arii' and a few 4canzunF provide all the narrative verse of
Sicily, together with 'legendi o storii*. There are mere allusions
in the 'canzuni': to the public baptism of the Saracens by William
the Good (1166-89), and even to Count Roger I (d. noi), to the
Sicilian Vespers, and to hostility towards the French.1 These
references have led to the inference that these poems go back to the
twelfth century; the inference is supported by the present tense in

Now that King William wears the crown

(Pitre 568)

and by Pitre's belief that the 'contrasto' of the Two Lovers (968) is
a prolongation of Ciullo d'Alcamo's thirteenth-century Contrasto.
But the allusions are too brief to warrant such conclusions,
especially as all these improvisations are touched by the higher
literature and show considerable virtuosity. It is not that there
wrere no songs sung in Sicily in those early years—far from it. But
the songs are not likely to have been these, with their dependence
on a much later development of artistic literature.

When we get narratives of some length we find that they belong
to a comparatively recent epoch. The oldest and best of the
Sicilian pieces is the Baroness (or Princess) of Carini (Pitre 918).
It is a confused, semi-literary bulletin in verse, in octaves and
irregular stanzas, describing the murder of Caterina Talamanca-
La Grua on the 4th December, 1565. Her lover, Vicenzo Verna-
gallo, actually escaped to Madrid and entered a religious order; but
the poet, perhaps influenced by Dante, sends him to Hell to see
the dead lady and the traitor who betrayed them. Monsu Bonello
(Pitre 919) corresponds, perhaps directly, to the first tale in the
Decameron. The poet dates the event precisely: 26th February
1399; but when he wrote Geneva was already a Calvinist city.

1 G. Pitre, Canti popolari Siciliani, Palermo, 1891, 2 vols., with bibliography.