Is Italian worth learning for literature? What are some great

>>8823430
pertrarch, dante

their italian is very different from modern italian, I think moreso than our english is different from shakespeare's

For literature I'm not sure...I live in Italy so it's wonderful to speak and read Calvino, Pirandello, and svevo. But Dante and Boccaccio are much closer to Latin than modern Italian so I'm not sure how much that Gould go for you.

On the flip side it's not a difficult language to grasp... much more difficult to master.

>>8823453
Italian is a nice language because as far I as know it's writing is transparent and close to the pronunciation, which would help a lot with learning it.

And what would you say about contemporary Italian lit?
And the last question, how much would knowing some latin help? Is the grammar similar?

I would learn Italian to be able to read the Divine Comedy in the original alone.

Italian is phonetic which helps you proceed quickly to a level b1 or b2. Getting to a C1 or C2 requires more work on grammar. That's the real killer.

There are some similarities with Latin... I can usually get the sense of what's written on monuments, ruins ect...

I have read much contemporary Italian lit. Doesn't seem there much a scene outside of cook books, Roman history and ghost written autobiographies on lame Italian pop stars...looking at you vasco Rossi. You suck balls.

>>8823471
Its not modern Italian ... it's vulgate

>>8823478
No, Vulgate is corrupt Latin. It's good old Tuscan, the vernacular of his time and place. Like Chaucer, that was part of the impact of the work (using contemporary rather than classical language)

>>8824599
Ah si? Non lo sapevo

Not op, but if I already know how to read Spanish fluently, how easy would it be to pick up Italian?

>>8824652
A lot. The pronuciation is the same, the lexicon is really close and afaik the grammar is not very hard to learn. I speak spanish and catalan and I can bullshit my way into italian half of the time by mixing both. Portugese too, but that's just because it is not a real language

Yes, I highly recommend reading Italian books.
You should try Roberto Saviano and Gianrico Carofiglio

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Ariosto, like all great Italian writers, as well as those who are inspired by Italian culture (Stendhal, Chaucer, etc.) imbues his work with a full of sense of life while being generally unconcerned with formal perfection. Italian literature has everything that's missing in contemporary Anglosphere (ie Protestant) novels, which tend to be cold and passionless artistic exercises.

Cf. Tasso and Manzoni, to a lesser extent.