Education
He was a native of Pratovecchio and studied with the Accademia della Crusca in Florence, where he contributed to its first Vocabolario della lingua italiana, published in 1623, in particular adding an index of Greek words.
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Agnolo Monosini
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Monosini had one craze which consumed all his intellectual energies: that of proving the Greek origins of the Florentine idiom, which would one day develop into modern Italian. The relationships that Monosini develops between Greek and his contemporary vernacular rather suffer from his unconditional enthusiasm, with the result that the associations proposed are often cumbersome and sometimes quite bizarre. In his key work, lingue libri novem (The Flower of Italian Language in a new book) published in 1604, he collected many vernacular Italian proverbs and idioms, and compared and contrasted them with Greek and Latin. particularly concentrated on proverbs and language from Tuscany and the high Maremma, and thus included many aspects of the ‘vulgar’ vernacular language which were to become part of the official Italian language at the time of the Risorgimento.
