La Grammatica Italiana

Torino: Loescher, 1957. Second Edition. Octavo in red cloth, gilt titles to spine; dust jacket; 628 pages; 22 cm Fine in Very Good(+) dust jacket; small signature to free endpaper, else no other markings present; a clean tight copy; dust jacket is toned, small open tear to corner, jacket is protected in archival mylar. Hardcover.

Uncommon in jacklet. A compact yet elegant exposition of the language as it stood in the mid-twentieth century, written by the same scholar responsible for the monumental Grande dizionario della lingua italiana. In this shorter pedagogical work, Battaglia treats Italian grammar not as a mechanical system but as an evolving organism shaped by literary usage, dialectal undercurrents, and the long historical arc from Latin to the modern tongue. He lays out phonetics, morphology, and syntax with remarkable clarity, grounding each point in examples drawn from both standard and literary Italian. The book’s lasting value lies in how it marries rigorous philology with a humane, almost conversational style; it remains a window onto pre-normative Italian at a moment when the language was settling into its contemporary form.