Jeronim De Rada and the Songs of Milosao: the Arbëresh poet who awakened a nation from afar

From the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, in successive waves, thousands of Albanians settled in southern Italy. Their descendants, the Arbëresh, kept their language, Byzantine rite and songs for centuries. From this world came one of the most important poets of the Albanian language: Jeronim De Rada, in Italian Girolamo de Rada.

From Macchia to Naples

De Rada was born in 1814 in Macchia Albanese (Maqi), an Arbëresh village in Calabria, where his father was a priest of the Byzantine rite. He studied at the college of Sant'Adriano in San Demetrio Corone, an important centre of Arbëresh culture, and then in Naples. As a young man he began collecting Arbëresh folk songs.

The Songs of Milosao

In 1836, in Naples, he published the poem The Songs of Milosao, with the Arbëresh text and an Italian translation. The poem tells of the love of Milosao, son of a lord of Shkodra, for Rina, the daughter of a farmer, at the time of the wars with the Ottomans. After many difficulties they marry, but their happiness is brief: Rina and the child die, and Milosao falls in battle.

The poem is lyrical, with images of nature, deep feeling and a Romantic spirit. Scholars often regard it as the beginning of Albanian Romantic literature and one of the first important works of the National Awakening.

De Rada saw language as a people's home. To write it was to keep it alive.

Journalist and organiser

De Rada also wrote other poetic and historical works, but his contribution went beyond literature. In 1883–1887 he published the newspaper Fiamuri Arbërit, one of the first Albanian newspapers, in which he defended the rights of Albanians and the need for a common alphabet. In 1895 and 1897 he helped organise the Arbëresh linguistic congresses in Corigliano Calabro and in Lungro.

He corresponded with Albanian and European intellectuals and worked for the recognition of Albanians as a people with their own language and history. He lived in poverty in his last years and died in 1903 in San Demetrio Corone.

Why we remember him

1. He showed that Albanian could be a language of high poetry.
2. He linked the Arbëresh with the national movement in the Balkans.
3. His work on the alphabet and the press prepared the way for later congresses, such as that of Manastir.