Sicilian school

Sicilian school

Group of Sicilian, southern Italian, and Tuscan poets centred in the courts of Frederick II (r. 1194–1250) and his son Manfred of Sicily (d. 1266). They established the vernacular, as opposed to Provençal, as the standard language for Italian love poetry and are also credited with inventing two major Italian poetic forms, the canzone and the sonnet. Some 125 of their poems are extant, many by Giacomo Da Lentini (fl. 13th century), the school's senior poet. The Sicilian-school sonnet became, with variations, the dominant poetic form in Renaissance Italy and Elizabethan England, where it was modified to form the English, or Shakespearean, sonnet.