Abstract
Four sonnets and an epigram of seven pentasyllabic lines – that completes Giuseppe Parini’s verse production in «meneghino», the Milanese vernacular. Yet, his position in the Olympus of 18th-century Milan’s dialectal poets is also due to his unflinching apology of the use of local dialects, and of Milanese in particular, in the linguistic polemic which opposed him to the Barnabite Onofrio Branda. This gained him Carlo Porta’s ranking him next to the great Maggi, Balestrieri and Tanzi. In his artistically indisputable vernacular verse production Parini also deployed an exquisite onomastic craftsmanship, albeit limited to a handful of names. Here, too, is revealed the kind of wittily allusive use of nominatio one can occasionally find in Parini’s «Tuscan» production.