Lamento siciliano, fasto aragonese, penitenza fiorentina

Due to a technical issue, the article was published without footnotes. We apologize to the author, the editor, and the readers. The corrected version of the article is available here in open access.

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This article proposes a new insight about the famous fifteenth-century Southern-Italian song Adxo visto lo mapamundi, also known with its Tuscan vernacular adaptation Aggio visto l’appamondo. Starting from the musicological studies by Atlas and Gerber and mainly focusing on the historical and geographical references of the text, the present research aims to restrict the creative context of the song to the early 1450s, verify any correspondence with a real coeval cartographic artefact and, finally, reconstruct the dynamics of its reception and adaptation in the Florentine sacred context. The chronological investigation is based on the analysis of the political allusions interspersed in some verses of the song: they reveal the discontent of the Sicilian administrative class for the marginalization of the island following the moving of the court of Alfonso the Magnanimous from Palermo to Naples. Regarding the reception in the Florentine context, attention is paid to the laudae by Francesco d’Altobianco Alberti and Feo Belcari, both based on the music of Adxo Visto lo mapamundi, extending the investigation to the melodic reuse of famous secular Southern-Italian songs in fifteenth-century Florentine devotional repertoire up to Savonarola.