Accademia della Crusca

Accademia della Crusca

The geographic distribution of the Italian language in the world.
Abbreviation	La Crusca
Motto	Il più bel fior ne coglie (She gathers the fairest flower)
Formation	1583 (1583)
Headquarters	Florence, Italy
Official language	Italian
President	Claudio Marazzini
Website	accademiadellacrusca.it

The Accademia della Crusca [akkaˈdɛːmja ˈdella ˈkruska] (Academy of the bran), generally abbreviated as La Crusca, is an Italian society for scholars and Italian linguists and philologists established in Florence. It is the most important research institution on Italian language as well as the oldest linguistic academy in the world.

The Accademia was founded in Florence in 1583 and, until 1900, it has been characterized by its efforts to maintain the purity of the Italian language. means "bran" in Italian, which conveys the metaphor that its work is similar to winnowing as it is well explained by the emblem of the Accademia della Crusca that depicts a sifter that is straining out corrupt words and structures (as wheat is separated from bran). The academy motto is "Il più bel fior ne coglie" ('She gathers the fairest flower'), a famous verse of the Italians poet Francesco Petrarca. In 1612, the Accademia published the first edition of its Dictionary: the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca, which also served as the model for similar works in French, Spanish, German and English.

The academy is a member of the European Federation of National Linguistic Institutes, a body convened to develop a joint policy to protect the integrity of national languages. The Federation has two Italian members: the Accademia della Crusca and the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano del CNR (an initiative launched by the Centro Nazionale delle Ricerche with the collaboration of the Accademia della Crusca).

The founders were originally called the brigata dei Crusconi and constituted a kind of circle, where the members included poets, men of letters, and lawyers. The members usually assembled on pleasant and convivial occasions, during which cruscate—discourses in a merry and playful style, which have neither a beginning nor an end—were recited for the purposes of fun. The declared intention of the group was to create a distance between itself and the pedantry of the Accademia Fiorentina, protected by Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici, and to contrast itself with the severe and classicising style of that body. The Crusconi battled against the classical pedantry of the Accademia through the use of humour, satire, and irony. However, it was important that this battle was fought without compromising the primary intention of the group, which was typically literary, and expounded in high quality literary disputes.