Donato Valli e la poesia dialettale

This contribution acknowledges the significant critical attention that Donato Valli reserved for the dialect production in verse in Salento. In fact, during a wide chronological period of over thirty years, the scholar conducted, with critical acumen and methodological rigor, a series of all-round investigations of poetry in Salento dialect of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here, in addition to mentioning the numerous publications (prefaces, forms, articles) he has edited, the salient phases of such investigations are retraced, the results of which are indelibly attested in the four volumes of the "Biblioteca di Scrittori Salentini" (1995 and 1998) and in the fundamental Storia della poesia dialettale nel Salento, a sort of critical-methodological summa, in which these results merged with further and definitive additions and integrations. Valli must be credited with having reported otherwise marginalized authors to the national attention ignored by critics and that, instead, today, thanks to him, appear in the major anthologies of Italian poetry of the Twentieth century in dialect.