La secchia rapita

La secchia rapita (The stolen bucket) is a mock-heroic epic poem by Alessandro Tassoni based on the real life event, the War of the Bucket which was first published in 1622 (see 1622 in poetry); it tells of a war between the Italian cities of Modena and Bologna over the possession of a wooden bucket that later influenced Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock.[1] John Ozell translated the poem as The Trophy Bucket in 1710: seeing his opportunity, Edmund Curll reprinted this item in June 1713 after the success of Alexander Pope's work.[1] "La secchia rapita" is also the name of a comic opera by Salieri, first performed in Vienna in 1772; two of the arias from the work was recorded by Cecilia Bartoli on her Salieri album.

Cover of the first edition of La Secchia rapita by Tassoni, printed in the maps Ronciglione in 1624

Description

The invention of the heroicomic poem is usually ascribed to Alessandro Tassoni who, in the year 1622, published at Paris a poem composed by him, in a few months of the year 1614, entitled La Secchia Rapita, or The Rape of the Bucket. To avoid giving offence, it was first printed under the name of Androvinci Melisone. It was afterwards reprinted at Venice, corrected, with the name of the author, and with some illustrations of Gasparo Salviani. Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni, in his Istoria della Volgar Poesia, informs us that it is doubtful whether the invention of the heroicomic poem ought to be ascribed to Tassoni, or to Francesco Bracciolini, who wrote Lo Scherno degli Dei, which performance, though it was printed four years after La Secchia, is nevertheless declared, in an epistle prefixed, to have been written many years sooner. The real subject of Tassoni's poem was the war which the inhabitants of Modena declared against those of Bologna, on the refusal of the latter to restore to them some towns, which had been detained ever since the time of the Emperor Frederick II. The author artfully made use of a popular tradition, according to which it was believed that a certain wooden bucket, which is kept at Modena, in the treasury of the cathedral, came from Bologna, and that it had been forcibly taken away by the Modenese. Crescimbeni adds, that because Tassoni had severely ridiculed the Bolognese, Bartolomeo Bocchini, to revenge his countrymen, printed, at Venice, 1641, a tragico-heroicomic poem, entitled Le Pazzie dei Savi, ovvero, II Lambertaccio, in which the Modenese are spoken of with much contempt.[2]

Editions
  • Tassoni, Alessandro (1622). La Secchia rapita (in Italian) (1 ed.). Paris: presso Tussan du Bray. Retrieved 2 December 2019.
  • Tassoni, Alessandro (1630). La Secchia rapita (in Italian) (2 ed.). Venice: presso Giacomo Scaglia. Retrieved 4 December 2019.

English translation
  • Tassoni, Alessandro (1713). The Trophy-Bucket. Translated by John Ozell (2 ed.). London: Edmund Curll. Retrieved 17 December 2019.
The stolen bucket, inside the Ghirlandina Tower

References
  1. Rogers, Pat (2004). The Alexander Pope Encyclopedia. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 292. ISBN 9780313324260.
  2. Pope, Alexander (1847). The Works of Alexander Pope, Esq., with Notes and Illustrations, by Himself and Others. To which are Added, a New Life of the Author, an Estimate of His Poetical Character and Writings, and Occasional Remarks by William Roscoe, Esq. 2. London: Longman. p. 397.
  • Cambridge History of Italian Literature ed. Brand and Pertile (1996) p. 310
  • The Salieri Album booklet notes to the recording by Cecilia Bartoli (Decca, 2003)
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