BOOKS – Love at the time of the Gonzaga family

La commedia del fidanzamento (A Comedy of Betrothal) is the first ever play in history to be written in Hebrew. It was composed around 1560 by Leone de’ Sommi, a playwright native of the city of Mantua (1525-1590), an important figure of the Jewish Community of the time and protégé of the Gonzaga family. The city of Mantua functions as the backdrop of the play, which tells of the dream of love of a young couple and the many vicissitudes they must deal with to fulfill it.

If it is true that “Renaissance speaks Hebrew,” as the title of one of the sections of the permanent exhibition of the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah in the nearby city of Ferrara suggests, the best “places” to grasp this concept are the pages of this illuminating play. At least, this is what Erica Baricci, professor of Jewish Language and Culture at the University of Mantua Foundation, suggests. She has curated an Italian edition of de’ Sommi’s work for the publisher Giuntina, thanks to the contribution of the Rut Foundation and the patronage of, among others, the City of Mantua and the UCEI.

There are multiple stimuli in this book, titled Leone de’ Sommi, La commedia del fidanzamento.
This is because in Mantua, like nowhere else, the Renaissance “enacted itself so imperiously and its cultural universality, wish its re-comprehension of the Jewish, Greek and Latin worlds, in addition to the ‘Italian’ one, showed such a unique and irreplicable awareness of itself,” writes Paolo Bernardini, a scholar of the Jewish-Italian relations in Mantua and beyond, in the preface of the book. This was not the case even in Ferrara, “where a vibrant Jewish community also flourished”. Nor in Venice or any of the other places “that were part of the bright galaxy that was Judaism in the Pianura Padana area at the beginning of the Modern Age”.

Translated by Rebecca Luna Escobar and revised by Chiara Tona, students at the Advanced School for Interpreters and Translators of the University of Trieste, trainees in the newsroom of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities — Pagine Ebraiche.