(a) The author
There is in the British Museum a smaller collection of poems which Niccolò Antonio
Carmignano published under his own name in 1516: Le Cose vulgare de Missere
Colantonio Carmignano. . . nouamente impresse, completed by Georgio di Rusconi at Venice
on 23 December 1516. Since the majority of these poems are to be found in the Operette of 'Il Suavio Parthenopeo' printed at Bari in 1535, it is, after
all, the author himself who discloses his identity and explains his pseudonym. The only
portion of the 1535 book which is not to be found in the earlier Venice edition is the
central part addressed to Donna Isabella de Aragonia, Duchess of Milan and
Bari, which deals with Queen Bona Sforza and her departure for Poland. More sonnets and
eclogues were added, and these one presumes were not written until after 1516. One of the
characters in the third and fourth of the four eclogues is called Suavio in both editions:
thus by 1516 Carmignano had already thought of the name which he was to use as his pseudonym
nearly twenty years later. The two books end with an epistle, ten sonnets, and a poem on the
Crucifixion, but the Bari edition adds two or three pages of new poems to the Virgin Mary. On
the whole, however, it is in the first half an almost page-for-page reprint of the Venice
edition.
This discovery was in fact made forty years ago in an exhaustive article by Giovanni Rosalba
in a periodical which for no good reason is not available in the British Isles.[2] I had an opportunity to consult it
during a recent visit to Florence.
