Carlo Osvaldo Goldoni was an Italian playwright and librettist from the Republic of Venice. His works include some of Italy's most famous and best-loved plays. Audiences have admired the plays of Goldoni for their ingenious mix of wit and honesty. His plays offered his contemporaries images of themselves, often dramatizing the lives, values, and conflicts of the emerging middle classes. Though he wrote in French and Italian, his plays make rich use of the Venetian language, regional vernacular, and colloquialisms. Goldoni also wrote under the pen name and title Polisseno Fegeio, Pastor Arcade, which he claimed in his memoirs the "Arcadians of Rome" bestowed on him.
Goldoni c. 1757
Palazzo Centani birthplace of Goldoni in Venice
Monument to Goldoni in Venice (sculpted by Antonio Dal Zotto)
Monument to Goldoni in Florence (sculpted by Ulisse Cambi)
Venetian, wider Venetian or Venetan is a Romance language spoken natively in the northeast of Italy, mostly in Veneto, where most of the five million inhabitants can understand it. It is sometimes spoken and often well understood outside Veneto: in Trentino, Friuli, the Julian March, Istria, and some towns of Slovenia, Dalmatia (Croatia) and Bay of Kotor (Montenegro) by a surviving autochthonous Venetian population, and in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, the United States and the United Kingdom by Venetians in the diaspora.
A sign in Venetian reading "Here Venetian is also spoken"
A street sign (nizioléto) in Venice using Venetian calle, as opposed to the Italian via
Lasa pur dir (Let them speak), an inscription on the Venetian House in Piran, southwestern Slovenia
Venetian sign in ticket office, Santa Lucia di Piave