La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language by Dianne Hales

★★★★★ (5/5)

A selection of my favourite passages from the book

• “Learning a new language is like growing a new head,” a European friend told me long ago. “You see with new eyes, hear with new ears, speak with a new tongue.” Neuroimaging has proved her right: the mental gymnastics of groping for even the simplest words in a different language ignites brand-new clusters of neurons and synapses.
• In grammar workshops with its native-born teachers, I paddled through Italian’s treacherous tenses, trying to navigate the confounding conditional and the slippery subjunctive. With even greater effort I struggled to corral its impish pronouns, which flit from the front to the back of sentences, disappear entirely, or latch on to verbs like fleas to a cat’s ear.
• At Camponeschi, our favorite restaurant in Rome, the waiters giggled when they overheard me describe the wonderful view from our apartment terrace of the roofs of Rome. Instead of the masculine tetti (roofs, pronounced tet-tee), I had used the feminine slang tette (tits, pronounced tet-tay).
• Best of all, I have realized how right the British author E. M. Forster was when he urged visitors to drop “that awful tourist idea that Italy’s only a museum of antiquities and art.” “Love and understand the Italians,” he urged, “for the people are more marvelous than the land.” Indeed they are— and I have had the good fortune both to love and understand some of them and to be loved and understood in return.
• As a country Italy makes no sense. Think of it: a spiny peninsula stretching from snowcapped Alps to sun baked islands, spattered with stone villages bound by ancient allegiances, a mosaic of dialects, cuisines, and cultures united into a nation barely a century and a half ago. Metternich dismissed it as a “geographic expression.” Too long to be a nation, sniffed Napoleon. Possible to govern, growled Mussolini, but useless to try. The real Italy resides somewhere beyond blood or borders in what President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi has called “la nostra prima patria” (“ our first fatherland”)— its language.
• While other tongues do little more than speak, this lyrical language thrills the ear, beguiles the mind, captivates the heart, enraptures the soul, and comes closer than any other idiom to expressing the essence of what it means to be human.
• With only an estimated 60 to 63 million native speakers (compared to a whopping 1.8 billion who claim at least a little English), Italian barely eclipses Urdu, Pakistan’s official language, for nineteenth place as a spoken tongue. Yet Italian ranks fourth among the world’s most studied languages— after English, Spanish, and French. In the United States, Italian has become the fastest-growing language taught in colleges and universities.
• This trend mystifies many. When I mentioned my Italian studies to a venture capitalist in San Francisco, he asked if I could have chosen a less practical language. I might have cited Urdu, but I saw his point.
• A color becomes more than a hue in Italian. A giallo (yellow) refers to a mystery— in life, literature, or movies— because thrillers traditionally had yellow covers. A Telefono Azzurro (blue telephone) is a hotline for abused children; a settimana bianca (white week), a ski holiday in winter; and a matrimonio in bianco (white wedding), an unconsummated and ostensibly unhappy marriage.
• Prince Charming always appears as Principe azzurro (the blue prince). Viola (purple) triggers so much apprehension that the wife of the Italian consul in San Francisco stopped our interview to ask me to switch to a different pen. Italians, she explained, associate purple with Lent, when drapes of that color shroud church statues. For many centuries, theaters closed during this penitential season so actors and singers lost their jobs and incomes. Because of their misfortune, unlucky purple became a color to avoid.
• A sign outside a rustic osteria (a tavern serving simple food) summarized its entire menu in three variations on a single word: pranzo (lunch)— fifteen euro; pranzetto (lighter lunch)— ten euro; pranzettino (bite to eat)— five euro.
• Take, for instance, Tommaseo’s entry on Italy’s national pastime (past and present): flirting, which translates into fare la civetta, or “make like an owl.” Only Italian distinguishes between a civettino, a precocious boy flattering a pretty woman; a civettone, a boorish lout doing the same; a civettina, an innocent coquette; and a civettuola, a brazen hussy. A giovanotto di prima barba (a boy who starts flirting even before growing a beard) may turn out to be a damerino (dandy), a zerbino (doormat), a zerbinetto (lady-killer), or a zerbinotto (a fop too old for such foolishness). If he becomes a cicisbeo, he joins a long line of Italian men who flagrantly courted married women.
• Vento (wind) melts into venticello (a nice little breeze); caldo (hot) snuggles into calduccio (nice and warm).
• A tiny tail at the end of the word transforms the coarse culo into culetto (a sweet little baby bottom) or culoni (big butts), a popular nickname for Americans.
• Suffixes such as -astro, -ucolo, or -accio also spell trouble. No one wants to hire an avvocatuccio (small-time lawyer), read the works of a poetucolo (untalented poet), wear a cappellaccio (ugly hat), or drive on a stradaccia (bad road).
• A very good person, someone we might praise in English as the salt of the earth, becomes un pezzo di pane (a piece of bread) in Italian. Rather than having heart or guts, a brave Italian has fegato (liver), while a man in gamba (literally “on a leg”) is on top of his game. In Italian, it’s a compliment to be praised for your nose (naso), for intuition; hand (mano), for artistry; or testicles (coglioni), for being, well, ballsy.
• In literary Italian (though not daily conversation) memories of times past can be summoned up in three words and ways— rammentare (with the mind, for facts), ricordare (with the heart, for feelings), and rimembrare (with the body, for physical sensations).
• “To remain like Father Falcuccio,” another Romanesco idiom, refers to a hypothetical priest who, having lost his clothes, had to cover his naked private parts with “one hand in front and another one behind.” A Roman ends up in this hapless predicament when, for instance, he wrecks his car before paying off the loan or his wife finds him with his mistress and both women dump him.
• The manhole covers of Rome are still emblazoned with S.P.Q.R., the Latin abbreviation for the Senatus Populusque Romani, the senate and people of Rome. (Italians joke that it really stands for Sono pazzi questi romani— These Romans are crazy.)
• Then as now an unabashed earthiness permeates both Italy’s language and culture. To ward off bad luck or malocchio (the evil eye), for instance, men long ago developed the habit of touching their genitals when, say, discussing a serious illness or passing a cemetery. The phrase “Io mi tocco” (“ I touch myself”) remains as common as “Knock on wood” in English, but the actual act, committed in public by a forty-two-year-old man from Como, recently led the Italian supreme court to ban such “potentially offensive” behavior. The judges advised superstitious men to delay reaching for their crotches until within the privacy of their homes.
• The amused vendor explained that the name of America’s windy city sounds like “ci (pronunced chee) cago” (“ I poop here”).
• Italians began adding a second distinguishing label or surname (called a patronymic) to their names, sometimes with the prefix di to mean “son of” or da for a town of origin, as in Leonardo da Vinci.
• Occupations inspired names such as Tagliabue for “ox-cutter” or “butcher” and Botticelli for “barrel maker”
• Others acquired names inspired by their appearance (Basso for “short,” Rosso for “redhead”), or personality (Benamato for “well loved”; Bentaccordi for “congenial;” Benedetto for “blessed;” Bonmarito for “good husband”).
• Hungry for adventure, Francesco joined Assisi’s military to fight neighboring Perugia. After being captured by enemy troops, he spent nearly a year in prison before his father ransomed him. This traumatic experience, followed by a serious illness, changed Francesco.
• The condemned men en route to these otherworldly destinations walked along the Via dei Malcontenti (Street of the Discontented) accompanied by hooded members of the Compagnia dei Neri (Company of the Blacks), through the Porta alla Giustizia (Gate of Justice) to the scaffold.
• In his Divine Comedy, Dante achieved his goal. This linguistic alchemist spun Italy’s lusty, lively, long-maligned vulgar tongue into literary gold: a gleaming new language second to none in its power and profundity.
• I were to study Italian more, I would speak it better.” “Se io studiassi di più l’italiano, lo parlerei meglio.”
  
  
• Their “low-style” dispute typifies a tenzone, an Italian literary contest in which two writers alternate insults, a tradition that began in the Middle Ages and continues to this day.
• In the last canto, Dante struggles to convey the inexpressible nature of God. He chooses the literary metaphor of a book bringing together all forms of knowledge, truth, and beauty scattered like loose pages throughout the universe.
• In another famous canto, Dante describes Ulysses rallying his men to journey beyond what seemed the utmost limit of human voyaging by reminding them of their noble origins: “You were not formed to live like beasts.” Mussolini appropriated this phrase—fatti non foste a viver come bruti— in his bombastic exhortations to restore the glory that was Rome.
• a man in need of riches,” she decides, “than riches in need of a man.”
• these sparkle with such earthy vitality that Italian coined the word boccaccesco to describe a spicy story.
• Faccia is what you wash in the morning. Viso appears in cosmetic ads and expressions such as far buon viso a cattiva sorte (to smile in the face of adversity). I didn’t grasp the proper use of volto until
• I saw my friend Ludovica Sebregondi’s elegant art book, Volti di Cristo (Faces of Christ), a limited-edition, five-thousand-euro oversized volume with artistic reproductions so precious that readers are advised to wear gloves when turning the pages. No wonder Italians chuckled when I asked if I had a sbaffo sul mio volto (smudge on my visage).
• Lorenzo elevated carnascialismo, carnival merriment, almost to the point of art. “If ever history could be happy, it was then,” wrote one commentator.
• My teachers had predicted that someday this milestone of a moment would come, that I would start thinking, reacting, even dreaming in Italian. I didn’t believe them. Yet here, in the cradle of the language, in the shadow of Italy’s tre corone, I crossed some invisible membrane into a world that at once was entirely familiar yet completely new. Springing to life in my brain, Italian had traveled to my fingertips and set them a flight.
• The Cinquecento also saw the invention of the enthusiastic exclamation point, dubbed un punto affettuoso, an affectionate period, by an editor of the time.
• Down through the centuries conquerors stole much of what Italians created. Emperors and kings routinely packed up paintings, sculptures, and jewels— a practice that continued into the twentieth century, when the Nazis filled railroad cars with pieces of Italian art. The one treasure no one could loot from Italians was their language, which La Crusca had elevated to a living art.
• Emperor Charles V, who once declared, “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.”
• In La Serenissima’s glittering heyday, correspondents signed letters, “Il Suo schiavo” (“ your slave”). Meeting on the street, acquaintances would bow and repeat the same ingratiating words
• However, in the Venetian dialect, which softens the hard sound of sch (pronounced sk in other regions) to a chewy sh (as in “show”), Suo schiavo came out sciao, which melted into ciao as it migrated to other parts of Italy.
• Castiglione won me over with a single word he created to describe the essence of courtly behavior: sprezzatura, the studied carelessness that “conceals art and presents everything said and done as something brought about without laboriousness and almost without giving it any thought.” The closest English comes is “nonchalance,”
• Surely anyone who’s ever dined at a rib joint on dollar night would recognize the voracious eaters Della Casa describes as “totally oblivious, like pigs with their snouts in the swill, never raising their faces nor their eyes, let alone their hands, from the food in front of them.”
• and directs men to remove black socks when otherwise nude and not to put their feet on a table as if they were a Texas oilman ( petroliere texano).
• Troppo bello, meno buono. Too much of the beautiful and less of the good, some of my Italian friends say cynically. But I relish the flourishes of bella figura, each an opportunity to transform minor interactions into memorable interludes.
• “Ah, signora, you are learning the Italian secret!” he exclaims. “And what is that?” “Our greatest art: the art of living.”
• A thousand years ago Italian— or, more precisely, the Florentine dialect of the time— had no words for “art” or “artist.” Arte meant “guild,” a collective of specialists in a certain field. (The greater “arts” were judges and notaries, cloth weaving, exchange, wool, silk, physicians and apothecaries, and furriers. The lesser “arts” included butchers, shoemakers, carpenters, innkeepers, bakers, and so on.)
• The painter Paolo Uccello (1397– 1475), for example, became so engrossed by studies of perspective that he often would refuse his wife’s requests to join her in their bedchamber so he could linger with what he called his “odd mistress.”
• Attila, one of Verdi’s lesser works, included a line that stirred millions of patriotic souls: “You may have the universe if I may have Italy.”
• Verdi brought a new quality to opera: ruvidezza, a roughness, a pounding, a grinding, an underground rumbling that produced a visceral effect aptly called furore. I think of it as the musical equivalent of Michelangelo’s terribilità.
• Italians have long realized that we are, quite literally, what we eat. Sapia, Latin for “taste,” gave rise to Italian’s sapienza (wisdom).
• Italians deftly describe a busybody who noses into everything as prezzemolo (parsley), someone uptight as a baccalà (dried cod), a silly fool as a salame (salami), and a bore as a pizza or a mozzarella. Gotten yourself into a mess? You’ve made an omelet (fatto una frittata). Fed up and can’t take any more? You’re at the fruit ( alla frutta). Have a crush on someone? You’re cooked (cotto). Italians dismiss a story told time and again as fritta e rifritta (fried and refried), a worthless or banal movie as a polpettone (large meatball), and something that’s all sizzle and no steak as tutto fumo e niente arrosto (all smoke and no roast).
• Anche l’occhio vuole la sua parte (the eye too wants its part). In Italy food must be bello as well as buono.
• But as we mixed a salad together one day, Maria-Augusta did share an old Italian axiom for flavoring a salad perfectly: find un prodigo (a spendthrift) to pour the oil, un avaro (miser) to add the vinegar, un saggio (a wise man) to add the salt, and un pazzo (a crazy man) to mix them all together.
• Italian proverbs testify to the national antipathy to a table for one: “Chi mangia solo crepa solo” (“ Who eats alone dies alone”). “Chi non mangia in compagnia è un ladro o una spia” (“ Who doesn’t eat with a companion is a thief or a spy”). “Chi mangia solo si strozza a ogni mollica” (“ Who eats alone chokes on every bite”).
• The word minestra became synonymous with survival and a metaphor for what one does to get by in life. If you have the means to act as you wish, you can have any minestra you want, including a minestrone, or big hearty soup. If not, you have to settle for minestra riscaldata, the same old reheated fare. When you have used all your options, mangia la minestra o salta dalla finestra— eat the soup or jump out the window.
• La morale della favola (the moral of the story): Sometimes it’s better to eat like a king than to be one.
• “To know a territory, you need to eat it,” the great Italian writer Italo Calvino once wrote. Keep this in mind the next time you twirl capellini around your fork, bite into a piping hot pizza, or savor a dish of steaming risotto. That’s not just food you’re eating. It’s Italy.
• In English a heart breaks just like a dish, but a lovesick Italian soul claims a word of its own— spezzare— when it shatters into bits.
• dissected the linguistic nuances that differentiate affetto, affezione, amore, amorevolezza, benevolenza, inclinazione, passione, amicizia, amistanza, amistà, carità, tenerezza, cordialità, svisceratezza, ardore, and ardenza.
• Ovid and nicknamed the Nose, is best known for his collection of classical myths in the Metamorphoses and his scandalous Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), a primer on flirting and seduction that included advice on how to pick up women at a race or gladiator bout: “Press your thigh against the woman sitting next to you,” he suggested. “If by chance a speck of dust falls in the girl’s lap, as it may, let it be flicked away by your fingers, and if there’s nothing, flick away the nothing: let anything be a reason for you to serve her.”
• Ovid’s advice to women: Arrive late. “Delay enhances charm; delay’s a great bard,” he noted. “Plain you may be, but at night you’ll look fine to the tipsy. Soft lights and shadows will mask your faults.”
  
  
  
• Manzoni’s characters’ names pop up regularly in contemporary conversations as shorthand for certain Italian types. For a while, I thought all of my friends had the same priest, the pliable Don Abbondio, as their pastor and that unscrupulous politicians happened to be named Rodrigo. No name may better suit a spewer of bureacratic gobbledygook than that of the corrupt lawyer, Azzeccagarbugli, a combination of the words for “guessing” and “confusion.”
• That’s not all they learned. Cinema, with its lifelike immediacy and visceral impact, did for modern Italians what Dante had for his countrymen in the fourteenth century: It created a new way of hearing, speaking, seeing, thinking, and imagining life in this world and beyond. Movies— no less than Italy’s great works of literature, art, manners, music, and cuisine— taught Italians how to be Italian.
• The glittering Venice Film Festival debuted in 1934 as a showcase for the Italian film industry. In 1937, on April 21, the mythical anniversary of the founding of Rome, Mussolini inaugurated Cinecittà (Cinema City), Rome’s equivalent of Hollywood’s expansive studio back lots.
• Movie titles also were translated into Italian: High Noon became Mezzogiorno di fuoco (Midday of Fire) and Gone with the Wind, Via col vento (Away with the Wind). In Italy, as everywhere else, Scarlett’s (Rossella in Italian) motto, “Domani è un altro giorno,” became a catchphrase of the day.
• The people’s favorites were bubbly fantasies known as telefoni bianchi (white telephone) films that presented a glamorous fantasy world so rich and rarified that even telephones made a style statement.
• “There are two shortcuts to speaking the language,” one of my early teachers told me. “You can take an Italian lover, or you can watch Italian movies.”
• These experiences, Fellini said, taught him that making movies was “the medium of expression most congenial… to my laziness, my ignorance, my curiosity about life, my inquisitiveness, my desire to see everything and to be independent, my lack of discipline, and my capacity for real sacrifice.”
• I’ve heard Italians use it as an expression of surprise (cazzo!), praise (cazzuto), boredom (scazzo), anger (incazzato), approximation (a cazzo), or plain and simple contempt (cazzone). “Col cazzo che ci vado!” translates as, “The hell I’ll go!;” “Che cazzo vuoi?” as “What the f*** do you want?”
• a guy can be a big disgusting shit (stronzone), a small charming one (stronzino or stronzettino), a shit with something going for him (stronzetto), a disagreeable shit (stronzaccio), or a bad but irresistible shit (stronzuccio). A filthy place, in case you ever find yourself in one in Italy, is a stronzaio.
• St. Thomas Aquinas (1225– 1274), hailed as “the titan of theology,” declared that la bestemmia was graver than homicide because it sprang from the intention to attack the goodness and generosity (bontà) of God himself, whereas insults took from a man the honor due him and the respect that meant as much as house and home.
• cafone can mutate into the son of an ignorant bumpkin (figlio d’un cafone), a crude slob (cafone rozzo), a tasteless boob (cafone sciocco), an ill-mannered fool (cafone maleducato), an officious ass (cafone impertinente), a tasteless jerk (cafone senza gusto), or a disgusting boor (cafone ripugnante).
• In The Tongues of Italy , the linguist Ernst Pulgram observes that the Romans and their descendants “thrice ruled the Western world in three different domains of human endeavor: once in government and law, once in religion, and once in art.” To this trio of triumphs, he added a fourth— in language.
• Under Fascism an Italian chauffeur became an autista; soccer turned into calcio; a bar was rechristened qui si beve (here one drinks).
• Ragazzo may be the proper Italian word for child, but a “kid” remains a bimbo in Florence, a citano in Siena, a puteo in Venice, a figgeu in Savona (Liguria), a burdel or burdlin in Romagna, a frut in Friuli, and a quatraro in some southern dialects
• Even Italians get confused by what some call the “Englishing” of their language. When a beauty salon dubbed itself “Top one,” Italians read the name as topone, or big rat, and didn’t venture inside.
• Some words that sound English actually have Italian roots. “Snob” may date back to Renaissance Florence, when the burgeoning middle class sought acceptance in the upper strata of local society. To distinguish between the true noble families and the nouveau riche, census-takers wrote s.nob (senza nobiltà, for “without nobility”) next to the names of social climbers (known in contemporary Italian as arrampicatori sociali).
• spazzamento, a good sweeping; spazzatina, a dusting; spazzola, a brush; and spazzolino da denti, a toothbrush.
• Despite such egregious excesses, I have no fears for the fate of a language that has survived invasions, ruthless inquisitors, foreign tyrants, strutting dictators, corrupt politicians, the European Union, ubiquitous English, and tourist hordes from around the world. Italian was born of an insatiable hunger to express, communicate, and connect. Nothing and no one can quench this urge.