Book excerpt: The immense linguistic wealth of Italy, reflecting her varied and multicentered history, is represented not only by its literary language -- the medium forged by Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, and adopted by countless other great writers -- but also by its many regional and local dialects, often so different from common Italian as to constitute in practice separate languages. The object of this book is to describe and, in as much as possible, account for the linguistic fragmentation of modern Italy, keeping in mind both diatopic and diastratic variation, along with diachrony and synchrony. Numerous maps serve as concrete illustration.