“Cose che è troppo lungo e pericoloso scrivere”. Note sull’uso del bergamasco con funzione criptica nelle lettere di Papa Giovanni XXIII

’40s by the future Pope John XXIII to his personal secretary, father Giacomo Testa. Inside the letters, the Italo-romance dialect spoken in Bergamo and its Province (Bergamasco), the native district of both the correspondents, is adopted in order to fulfil an apparently cryptic function, i.e., to conceal the contents of the letters. A qualitative analysis of the texts will reveal the graphic solutions exploited in order to write a language lacking an established written tradition and a standard orthography, such as the Bergamasco dialect. We will concentrate on the graphic choices most divergent from the Italian orthographic norm, which is supposed to be the main example available to the writer. Finally, some of the lexical choices aimed at preventing the interpretations of the letters will be thoroughly discussed so as to shed light on the creative concealment strategies devised by the Author of the missives