English transcript:

There is someone, a writer who would have faced the challenge of speaking Neapolitan for 1 minute as though it were a walk in the park.

This Neapolitan writer, this intellectual is none others than Renato de Falco. A pillar of Neapolitan linguistics of all time. Author of numerous texts – from ‘Alfabeto Napoletano’ to ‘Il Napoletanario’ – as well as presenter one of the most intelligent television programmes for our language.

Surely, Renato de Falco would have not pulled out. I know this also because he never once refused to lend me a helping hand, whenever I asked him for a little support or advice.

As it happened in 2003, when I asked him to write an article for the magazine ‘A mmasciata’ (The Message). The title was ‘’E pparole d’ ’o core’ (‘The words from the heart’) and it read:

Giulio Cesare Cortese – the elder, as he was nicknamed – was right all the way. When, in his book ‘Lo viaggio de Parnaso’ (1621), he wrote: “The words of Naples are not kneaded from fake gold, my dear friend, but rather from sugar and honey”. Sweet words indeed, those of our language (the one that Gian Battista Vico deemed philosophical), referred to by the Pietro Trinchera (the notary-writer author of ‘Commedie d’ ’e Quatriglie) as rich and metaphorical; the language that Don Giulio Genuino described as “compelling, graceful, coy, and sneaky.

Words that come from the heart first and then from our mind; they can demonstrate, portray and powerfully lay out better than any other anything we want to convey”. 
Let’s love this language of ours. It is the same language that Thomas Aquinas used to preach at the Basilica of San Domenico Maggiore; the one that was chosen (and masterfully utilised) by Basile in his ‘Tale of Tales’.

Let’s love this way of talking of ours, the language of our souls, the outburst of our hearts, the sound of our thoughts, the expression of intimacy, the companion in our every-day lives, a cabinet for the history of Naples, and the one that is capable of instilling a sense of family thus making blood brothers of us all.

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