La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World's Most Enchanting Language

by Dianne Hales

  “Dottor Hales,” he announced dramatically, “parachuted into Vietnam and won the highest military honors and many medals for his bravery.”

  “Che eroe!” a young doctor behind me murmured in admiration. Not comprehending a word, my husband, whose only assignment outside the continental United States had been in Hawaii, nodded, as if in modest recognition. Struggling not to laugh, I applauded the Italian knack for reassembling mere facts into a far more intriguing fiction.

  The madly ambitious idea of a book about a language other than my own grew out of a fiction-writing group I belonged to for several years. I wrote a rather dreadful novel called “Becoming Italian” about the adventures of a group of students, interspersed with notes on the language. Character, plot, and dialogue didn’t much interest me; writing about Italian was the most fun I’d ever had with a word-processing program.

  Although my Italian could keep me afloat in friendly conversations, I realized I would need much more intensive study to manage interviews and research. And so I arranged private lessons in Florence, the cradle of the language. Some American friends joked that the entire undertaking seemed a ruse to spend more time in Italy, especially when I mentioned il mio palazzo—not really mine, of course, but the Palazzo Magnani Feroni, a boutique hotel in a sixteenth-century palace in the charming neighborhood of San Frediano. I arrived in a cold, rainy March, and the managers—all beautiful, dynamic young women—upgraded me from a studio to a suite named Beatrice (for Dante’s muse), with lavishly decorated ceilings, Venetian chandeliers, and handmade soaps presented like jewels in a velvet-lined case so each guest could choose a favored scent.

  Best of all, I could climb a sixty-step staircase to the terrace of a medieval tower with a 360-degree view of Florence’s spectacular skyline and distant hills. Last year Bob and I celebrated our thirtieth wedding anniversary on this magical perch with a romantic dinner for two, a cake with our names entwined with hearts, and an exquisite bouquet that was a special gift from the lovely ladies who have been my cheerleaders from the very beginning of this project.

  I found another cheerleader and coconspirator in San Francisco, Alessandra Cattani, the diction tutor for the San Francisco Opera. A Romana who migrated to the United States years ago, she taught me Italian the way Italians learn the language—through fairy tales, comic books, epic poems, classic novels, operas, folk songs, movies, newspapers, and hours and hours of chatting (chiacchierare) in Italian.

  I began each session with a mantra: “Sono italiana, sono italiana, sono italiana” (“I am Italian, I am Italian, I am Italian”). I must see with Italian eyes, Alessandra would remind me, hear with Italian ears, speak with Italian rhythms.

  “How would you say, ‘Give me a kiss’?” Alessandra asked one day.

  “Dammi un bacio,” I replied, somewhat taken aback by the query.

  “No, no, no,” she chastised gently, explaining that the combination of n and b strikes an Italian ear as molto brutta, so I must run them together into an m.

  “Dammi umbacio!” I dutifully repeated, although this phrase seemed even less likely to enter my conversations in Italy than the one that would excuse me to smoke in the hallway.

  I was wrong. One of the many Italians who coached me in their language asked for a kiss (and, yes, he said umbacio) the first time we met. When I pulled away, he added the irresistible kicker, “But I’m eighty-seven!” Born into the Sicilian aristocracy, Ignazio Leone fled as a boy with his family to Florence during World War II. By listening to the state-sponsored radio, he taught himself perfectly enunciated Italian. In conversations with him at Libri d’Arte, his antique shop near the Ponte Vecchio, I learned the words for, and the stories behind, his heirloom jewelry, rare books, archaeological oddities, antique dolls, and other treasures.

  Rather than contacting perfect strangers and asking them questions (as I have done routinely as a journalist in the United States), I had to find sources the Italian way—by building a network, conversation by conversation, person by person, friend by friend. I doubted if I’d ever hear back from a real VIP (Italians pronounce this abbreviation veep). But one evening as Bob and I were taking our usual passeggiata through Rome’s tranquil Borghese gardens, I heard the squillo, or ring, of my tiny Italian telefonino in his trouser pocket.

  “Your pants are ringing!” I said, taking the phone from him to talk to our friend Roberto, whose call I was expecting.

  “Ciao, Roberto!” I said merrily.

  “Ma, Diana, sei proprio brava! Come sai il mio nome?” (“But Diana, you are really great. How did you know my name?”)

  It wasn’t our friend Roberto, but the voice sounded oddly familiar. As I struggled to keep up with his rapid-fire Italian, I realized that the caller was the actor Roberto Benigni, a friend of a friend of a friend’s. “If you love my language,” he declared, “I love you.”

  When I began interviewing linguists, historian’s, and scholars at Italy’s leading language institutions, such as L’Accademia della Crusca and the Società Dante Alighieri, Lucilla Pizzolli, a young collaborator, gasped that I was being “un po’ audace”—a bit daring. I agreed and spent days preparing for each interview. As extra insurance, I wore great shoes (always Italian) and wrapped myself in an elegant black shawl (which I came to think of as my magic cape) so I could, at the least, fare bella figura (make a good impression).

  In time all of Italy became my schoolhouse, and virtually every Italian I met—from the ebullient Contessa Maria-Vittoria Rimbotti, who advised me to stop thinking about the language and just live in it, to a comic cast of cabbies—became a tutor. In Verona, at the home of Maestro Maurizio Barbacini, his beautiful wife, Antonella, a soprano who has performed opera’s leading roles, soared into an aria to illustrate how lyrics and music blend together. Clutching a candle in the Colosseum on Good Friday, I listened to one of the most moving lessons I’ve ever had in any language: dramatic interpretations by professional actors of the gospel descriptions of Christ’s suffering on the via crucis (the way of the cross)—a phrase Italians use, ironically and not, for any difficult path.

  My greatest resources turned out to be the Italians themselves, their deep pride in their native tongue, and their infinite patience with those who try to learn it. In contrast to the French, who praise an impeccable speaker for having une langue châtiée, which literally means “a punished tongue,” an Italian friend gave me the highest of compliments when he said that my Italian had progressed from being involto (rolled tight, like cannelloni) to disinvolto, as loose and easy, in his words, as a lasagna noodle. Then he taught me a delightful Italian tongue twister (scioglilingua):

  Al pozzo dei pazzi c’era una pazza

  che lavava una pezza mangiando una pizza.

  Arriva un pazzo e butta la pazza, la pezza,

  E la pizza nel pozzo dei pazzi.

  At the well of the crazies, there was a crazy woman

  Who was washing a rag eating pizza.

  A crazy man arrives and throws the crazy woman, the rag,

  and the pizza into the well of the crazies.

  Italians say that someone who acquires a new language “possesses” it. In my case, Italian possesses me. With Italian racing like blood through my veins, I do indeed see with different eyes, hear with different ears, and drink in the world with all my senses—an experience Italian encapsulates in the word sentire.

  “Sei proprio italiana” (“You really are Italian”), Roberto Scio, the owner of Il Pellicano, the seaside hotel we’ve returned to annually for twenty years, assures me—not because of the language, he notes, but of what I’ve learned from it: come far sorridere l’anima (how to make the soul smile).

  In La Bella Lingua—a true opera amorosa, a labor of love—I invite you to come along on my idiosyncratic journey through what I consider the world’s most loved and lovable language. I have cherry-picked the liveliest parts of Italian’s history and the golden eras of its literature, art, music, movies, and culture. In these pages, you will
meet the people, visit the places, read the words, behold the paintings, hear the music, taste the meals, watch the movies, and discover the secrets that bring joy to my soul—and, I hope, to yours.

  Cominciamo! Let’s get started!

  WHEN I ARRIVED IN ITALY FOR THE FIRST TIME in 1983 I knew only one Italian sentence: “Mi dispiace, ma non parlo italiano” (“I’m sorry, but I don’t speak Italian”). In my first minutes in the country, I repeated it half a dozen times, with ever-mounting panic in my voice, interspersed with pleas of “Stop this train!” Other passengers responded with concerned looks and torrents of incomprehensible Italian. Only the weary conductor followed my gaze as I pointed to my forlorn black suitcase, which the porter had left behind on the platform in Domodossola.

  “La sua valigia?” (“Your suitcase?”)

  “Sì.” I nodded, frantic that I would never be reunited with it again.

  “Non c’è problema,” he announced loudly. “Domani mattina a Milano.”

  The faces encircling me smiled in relief. “Domani mattina,” they repeated reassuringly. “Domani mattina.”

  Settling into my seat, I rolled the melodious syllables around my mouth. Yes, as soon as I arrived in Milan, I would find Signor Domani Mattina, and he would somehow retrieve my bag. In the colossal bleakness of the Milan station, I threaded my way down massive stone staircases. Late on a Sunday afternoon, everything was closed. I rushed to a man in a blue custodial uniform and entreated, “Signor Domani Mattina?”

  “No, signorina,” he said, looking confused. I whipped out my pocket English-Italian dictionary to find the Italian word for “where,” which I mispronounced as if it were the English name of a gentle white bird: “Dove?”

  “Doh-VAY!” he boomed before breaking into laughter. “No, signorina, the day after today. Domani mattina.”

  My quest for the quixotic “Mr. Tomorrow Morning” launched my journey into the Italian language. Throughout that first semisilent excursion in Italy, I delighted in the beauty of what I saw, but I craved comprehension of what I heard. I wanted to understand the waiter’s quip when he set down my cappuccino, the barzelletta (funny story) the shopkeeper told with a wink, the verbal embraces couples exchanged as they strolled at twilight. And so, unlike Italophiles who trek through frescoed churches or restore rustic farmhouses, I chose to inhabit the language, as bawdy as it is beautiful, as zesty a linguistic stew as the peppery puttanesca sauce named for Italy’s notorious ladies of the night.

  Over the last quarter-century, I have devoted countless hours and effort—enough, if applied to more practical pursuits, for the down payment on a villa in Umbria—to the wiliest of Western tongues. I have studied Italian in every way I could find—from Berlitz to books, with CDs and podcasts, in private tutorials and conversation groups, and during what some might deem unconscionable amounts of time in Italy.

  I’ve come to think of Italian as a briccone—a lovable rascal, a clever, twinkle-eyed scamp that you can’t resist even when it plays you for the fool. Croce e delizia, torment and delight, Verdi’s Violetta sang of love. The same holds true for the language his operas carried on golden wings. Yet, to an extent I never dreamed possible, Italian has become not just a passion and a pleasure but a passport into Italy’s storia—a word that means both “history” and “story.”

  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.

  And what a language it is! Italian, handcrafted by poets and wordsmiths, embodies its native speakers’ greatest genius: the ability to transform anything—from marble to melody, from the humble noodle to life itself—into a joyous art. English, like a big black felt-nosed Magic Marker, declares itself in bold statements and blunt talk. Italian’s sleek, fine-pointed quill twirls into delicate curlicues and dramatic flourishes. 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.

  Centuries before there was an Italy, there was Italian. Its roots date back nearly three millennia. According to legend, in 753 B.C., Romulus, son of the god Mars and a vestal virgin, after killing his twin brother, Remus, founded a settlement for his band of itinerant shepherds and farmers on the hills above the Tiber. Their utterances evolved into the volgare (from the Latin sermo vulgaris, for the people’s common speech), the rough-and-ready spoken vernacular. Scrappy street Latin, not the classical, cadenced rhetoric of Caesar and Cicero, gave rise to all the Romance languages, including Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian.

  The first miracle of Italian is its survival. No government mandated its use. No mighty empire promoted it as an official language. No conquering armies or armadas trumpeted it to distant lands. Brutally divided, invaded, and conquered, the Mediterranean peninsula remained a patchwork of dialects, often as different from one another as French from Spanish or English from Italian. Sailors from Genoa couldn’t understand—or be understood by—merchants from Venice or farmers from Friuli. Florentines living in il centro, the heart of the city, couldn’t speak the dialect of San Frediano, my favorite neighborhood, on the other side of the Arno.

  Italian as we know it was created, not born. With the same thunderbolt genius that would transform art in the Renaissance, writers of fourteenth-century Florence—Dante first and foremost—crafted the effervescent Tuscan vernacular into a language rich and powerful enough to sweep down from heaven and up from hell. This priceless living legacy, no less than Petrarch’s poetry, Michelangelo’s sculptures, Verdi’s operas, Fellini’s movies, or Valentino’s dresses, is an artistic masterwork.

  Through centuries of often brutal foreign domination, words remained all that Italy’s people could claim as their own. “When a people has lost homeland and liberty, their language takes the place of a nation and of everything,” observed Luigi Settembrini, a nineteenth-century Neapolitan “professor of eloquence” who dedicated his life to the language that came to define Western civilization. “Italians” gave the name “America” (a tribute to the Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci) to Americans; created the first universities, law and medical schools, banks, and public libraries; taught diplomacy and manners to Europe; showed the French how to eat with a fork; mapped the moon (in the 1600s); split the atom; produced the first modern histories, satires, sonnets, and travelogues; invented the battery, barometer, radio, and thermometer; and bestowed on the world the eternal gift of music.

  Yet as a national spoken tongue, Italian, practically born yesterday, is nuovissimo (very, very new), says the noted linguist Giuseppe Patota in an interview in his apartment in Rome. Rallying for one nation united by one language, Italians won their country’s independence in 1861, almost a century later than the United States. At the time four in five of its citizens were illiterate. Fewer than 10 percent spoke Italian exclusively or with greater ease than a local dialect. Not until 1996—135 years after unification—did more than half of Italians report using italiano standard (the national language) rather than dialect outside their homes. Word by word, generation by generation, village by village, the people of the peninsula became Italian speakers.

  Ever-growing numbers of people around the world are trying to do the same. English may be the language everyone needs to know, but Italian is the language people want to learn. 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 eclipse
s 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. So popular is the “new French,” as the New York Times dubbed it, that parents—and not just those of Italian descent—are sending toddlers to piccole scuole (little schools) to learn it.

  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. My husband can unfurl his college French (or at least a few tattered remnants of it) everywhere from Paris to Polynesia, and Spanish unlocks the keys to an entire atlas of nations. Only four countries other than Italy—Switzerland, Croatia, San Marino, and Slovenia, along with the Vatican—recognize Italian as an official language. No scientific society, multinational trade association, or global enterprise, even if based in Italy, requires Italian as its lingua franca. And certainly tourists can get by with a smile and a ciao in a country that has been serving, seducing, and satisfying foreigners for centuries.

  So why do so many people want to study Italian? “I suspect it is because Italy and the Italian language are perceived as beautiful, fun, and sexy,” observed Stephen Brockman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, in a recent essay called “A Defense of European Languages,” adding, “And why not? I can’t see anything wrong with that.” The Italian newspaper La Repubblica, reporting on the boom in Italian courses at American universities, cited the soaring popularity of Italian food, fashion, art, architecture, music, and culture and noted that Americans see Italian “come una lingua polisensoriale capace di aprire le porte al bello” (“as a multi sensory language able to open the gates to beauty”).