Marietta, Tizian und die Ampezzaner. Zur kuriosen (Wirkungs-) Geschichte des ampezzanischen Liebesgedichts. Ara mé noviza

Abstract

The love poem Ara mé noviza (“To my beloved”) was written in the 19th century in the Ladin municipality of Ampezzo. This composition is mostly attributed to the Ampezzo engineer Firmiliano De Gaspari (1828-1877), but it could also be a piece of ancient Ampezzo song literature. The 13-stanza poem was recorded – and thus made accessible to a larger audience – for the first time in Ampezzo illustrato, a publication about the history of Cortina written by De Gaspari (probably around 1860), which is unfortunately lost or missing today. In the following decades, several stanzas from this work were repeatedly copied and disseminated, among others by the Pustertal tourism pioneer Josef Anton Rohracher (1857–1954). At the beginning of the 1890s, the Tyrolean author Josef Calasanz Platter (1858–1905) copied a few stanzas of the poem from a travel guide published by Rohracher in 1878 and used them for his narrative Castell Majon, set in Cortina d’Ampezzo. In 1892, a tourist from the North of Italy who visited Ampezzo, perhaps the irredentist and literary scholar Albino Zenatti, copied five stanzas of the dialectal poem and subsequently published them in the “Gazzetta di Venezia” as an unknown poem by Titian, linking it to an old local Ampezzo tradition according to which the important Renaissance artist was born in Campo di Sotto. In 1909, some stanzas of the same poem were again spread in the daily press, journals and tourist guides as a work of Titian. And even in more recent times, people did not want to completely rule out the authorship of the artist born in Pieve di Cadore. In reality, a more or less skilful forger was at work in 1892, who probably wanted to make capital and profit from the discovery of an alleged poem by Titian and also to defraud the people of Ampezzo.