'A vucchella

'A vucchella is a Neapolitan song composed by Paolo Tosti. The poet who wrote the verse of this poem is one of the greatest lyric poets of the 19th century, Gabriele D'Annunzio. He was not from Naples, but from a city in the region of Abruzzo. With the Neapolitan melodic song tradition being so popular worldwide, D'Annunzio wanted to prove himself able to write in the Neapolitan dialect, and managed to do so quite convincingly for this song, "La vucchella".

However, despite his best efforts, critics wonder what he actually meant with the expression 'your rose-like withered little mouth'. One interpretation is that the woman's mouth is like a little rose's petal when it becomes a bit dried out and battered in the cold weather. The poet has turned his gaze on the woman's face and focussed on the woman's mouth, specifically. "A vucchella" is thus a synecdoche - the part for the whole. ^[1]

D'Annunzio was known as a lover of women of all ages, so one cannot exclude the possibility that the woman in question, whose rose-like dried mouth the seductive poet was writing about, was in her late forties or even older.^[2] The text does not belong to the old Seventieth/Eighteenth century Neapolitan lyric tradition, and was specially written for Tosti by Gabriele D'Annunzio in the first half of the 1900.^[3]

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