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

by Dianne Hales

  An Italian expressing such sentiments would have inserted a word or two in dialect that would have brought other Italians to tears or laughter. For foreigners, dialect words simply add to the dizzying complexity of the language. Depending on where you are in Italy, you might sit on a sedia, seggiola, or seggia; blow your nose into a fazzoletto, pezzuolo, or moccichino; and wear calzini, calzette, calze, calzettoni, calzettini, or pedalini with your shoes. A thousand years ago Italian Jews fashioned a dialect of their own mixed with Hebrew, now called Italkian, which is still spoken by about four thousand natives. A Venetian translated Shakespeare’s plays into his dialect because he felt that Italian was insufficient to transmit their emotional complexity.

  Even metaphors vary by region. Florentines call a blowsy lady an “unmade bed” and an aging cavalier a “tired horse.” The long-impoverished Calabrians lament their plight with sayings like “Dogs only bite the poor.” When bored, Romans complain that they are “dying of pinches.” A Romano de Roma (dialect for a Roman whose family has lived in the city for several generations) describes a local politician as “the best cat in the Colosseum” (which is overrun by feral felines), the figure who comes off best in a difficult situation.

  “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.

  Death too takes different forms in dialects. Romans call it “the skinny woman.” When Italians in other regions die, they “go to the pointed trees” (cypresses, often found in Tuscan cemeteries), “make soil for chick peas” (a common vegetable), “stretch their legs,” “wear the other trousers” (the good ones saved for special occasions), or, oddly, “pull the robin’s dick.”

  “We have campanilismo in everything,” says my tutor Alessandra Cattani, referring to Italian’s allegiance to all that lies within view of the local bell tower. This attitude treats even folks on the next hilltop as out-of-towners to be viewed with a certain amount of suspicion—and sometimes derision. Northerners scoff at southerners as terroni (peasants who work the land). Southerners snipe at northerners as polentoni (big eaters of polenta, once standard fare for the popolo magro—the skinny or poor people). “Non fare il genovese” (“Don’t act like someone from Genoa!”), I’ve heard one friend chide another—in other words, don’t be cheap. “Fare alla romana” translates into going Dutch. And every time we’ve headed for Pisa, someone has intoned, “Meglio un morto in casa che un pisano all’uscio” (“Better a corpse in the house than a Pisan at the door!”). The Pisans’ response: “Che dio t’accon tenti!” (May God grant your wish!)

  Perhaps because of this Babel of dialects, Italians cultivated an alternative language: gestures. In Italy, the shrug of a shoulder, the flip of a wrist, or the lift of an eyebrow says more than a sacco di parole (sack of words). A clenched fist signifies rage, irritation, anger, or threat; fingers bunched together indicate complexity or confusion. A tug at the corner of an eye means “Watch out!” A tap on the head indicates comprehension, intuition, or idiocy.

  After a few hours of careful observation in a piazza, anyone can become fluent in this wordless variant of Italian. Need a favor? Clasp your palms together with fingers extended as if in prayer and press them in front of your chest. Don’t give a damn? Slide your fingers upward from your neck past the tip of your chin. Was the dinner or day absolute perfection? Draw a straight horizontal line in the air. A Neapolitan waiter showed us how he signals the best-tasting dishes on the menu—by corkscrewing an index finger into his cheek, a gesture Italian men repeat on the street when a tasty-looking girl walks by.

  Such silent entertainment is one of the pleasures of Italy that come, as Luigi Barzini observed in The Italians, from living in a world “made by man, for man, to the measure of man.” The pleasure of Italian’s man-made language, he noted, comes from teaching “that things don’t have to be exactly what they look like, reality does not have to be dull and ugly.”

  With words alone, Italians have developed simple, life-affirming ways to transform dreary days into delightful ones and mundane chores into memorable events. Bob and I have entered wineshops looking only for a nice bottle to drink with dinner and emerged hours later after having toured a subterranean vault, sampled several vintages, and listened to a tutorial on the differences between Sangiovese, the pride of Tuscany, and Nebbiolo, the Piedmont wine with a name (little fog) that describes the region’s typical weather.

  In the process, we invariably acquire a new word or two. Any connoisseur may appreciate a fine wine, we’ve learned, but Italians prefer to approfondire (go deeper) and assaporare—surrender themselves to the slow discovery of its fullness. The very last drop from a bottle of wine (la scolatura) always goes to the belli di natura—to the greatest natural beauties, male or female. Italians so appreciate the final sips of wine that the Roman dialect poet Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli once celebrated the delights of sgoccetto, savoring these last drops, in verse.

  Like the pleasure of such terms, words for pleasure take tantalizing forms. A nation of inspired cooks and enthusiastic eaters has, of course, coined a specific word for a lust for a food—goloso (from gola for “throat”), which goes beyond mere appetite, craving, or hunger. Friends readily, even proudly confess to being golosi for cioccolata, sfogliatelle (stuffed pastries), or supplì (melt-in-your-mouth rice and cheese balls).

  One evening I regaled a conversation group with a tale about an article called “Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Medical Student” that I had written as a young reporter. “I had no idea that I was spending the night with the future surgeon general,” I said in Italian, “and I enjoyed it.” The teacher, a worldly sophisticate who speaks four languages, leaned close to whisper that the term I had used referred only to sex.

  An Italian amante (lover) may be amoroso (amorous), amabile (lovable), amato (beloved), or all three. Many an Italian man is an amatore (a lover of, say, wine, women, or song). An Italian woman may be an amatrice (a lover, perhaps, of the fine things in life). There is no English word that quite captures the sensation of innamoramento, crazy head-over-heels love, deeper than infatuation, way beyond bewitched, bothered, and bewildered. But that’s what I am—an innamorata, enchanted by Italian, fascinated by its story and its stories, tantalized by its adventures, addicted to its sound, and ever eager to spend more time in its company.

  “WHERE DID THEY COME FROM?” I ASK OUR balding, paunchy guide in Pompeii’s notorious brothel. He looks at me quizzically. “The prostitutes,” I say, adding povere donne—poor women.

  “No, signora,” he bristles, insisting that Pompeii’s ladies of the night were anything but poor. In fact, they were well fed and well dressed—and lucky to have Roman soldiers, the finest men on earth, as their lovers. When I object that the women were nonetheless selling their bodies, the guide dismisses my protest with a toss of his hand.

  “They would have paid for the privilege.” I raise an eyebrow.

  “It still happens,” he insists. Rustling through his wallet, he retrieves a dog-eared identification photo of himself at twenty, so bello that women offered money to sleep with him. To distract him, I point to the graffiti scrawled on the walls, clearly not the Latin I studied in high school.

  “Of course not,” he says. “It’s the volgare.” As he translates with undisguised relish the crude testimonials to Myrtis’s skills at fellatio and to the services Drauca delivers for a denaro, “vulgar” also applies.

  Not all of Pompeii’s graffiti was so graphic. In a simple red script with letters about six inches high, signs along the town’s narrow streets endorsed political candidates; denounced dead-beats; declared that the next gladiatorial show in the amphitheater would be the biggest, finest, most spectacular Pompeii had ever seen (it wa
s certainly its last); and issued no-nonsense directives, such as “If you must lean against a wall, lean against someone else’s.” A notice in the dining room of a fashionable home asked visitors to refrain from casting lascivious looks at the serving women or making passes at the wives of other guests and, above all, to keep the conversation clean. “If you can’t,” the blunt last line exhorted, “please go home.”

  Pompeii, buried by an eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79, seems to have been the Las Vegas of its day. No evidence exists that Christianity ever breached its walls. In this thoroughly pagan place, pleasures—of the bedroom, the table, the theater, and the sports arena—were the true religion. Yet we owe a debt to Pompeii’s freewheeling citizens and their incorrigible urge to write on walls. The sheer zest of their words testifies to the potency of the upstart language created by and for the people of the Roman Empire—and provides a fitting start to the saga of how Italian became Italian.

  Latin, both formal and informal, evolved from the dialect of the tribes of Lazio, the region around Rome. In other parts of the peninsula locals spoke various languages—Etruscan in Etruria (the area in central Italy that includes Tuscany), more Greek-influenced tongues to the south, and distinctively different dialects to the north, east, and west. When Roman troops conquered the Italian peninsula and then marched to the ends of the known world, classical Latin became the official language of government, commerce, and learning. Its imprint remains on everything from coins to monuments, temples, and tombs. 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.)

  The ephemeral vernacular lived in the air—in the shouts of the amphitheater, the banter of the marketplace, the jokes at bawdy street shows. No one knows what the volgare sounded like in the mouths of the earthy citizens of Pompeii, but I have a hunch. It came to me at Il San Pietro di Positano, a hotel just down the spectacularly scenic Amalfi coast.

  One entire wall of our room, built into the side of a cliff, was made of black rock. But what grabbed my eye as we entered was the size of the bed. “It must have been made for orgies,” I whispered to Bob. As soon as I peeked in the bathroom, I knew I was right. There, towering over a sunken tiled tub big enough for a half dozen well-lathered bodies stood a marble hermaphrodite with a knowing grin, a gleaming bosom, and a huge erect phallus, adorned with several strings of gemstones, that doubled as a spigot.

  Bathing in that tub felt wanton, if not downright decadent—exactly as I imagine speaking the region’s volgare once did. 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 ancient Romans didn’t have to worry about breaking any rules when they spoke the vernacular; there weren’t any. Neither did the volgare impose any class or social distinctions. Because classical Latin was essentially a literary language, citizens of every stripe and status had to speak some form of the vernacular in everyday life, certainly in their beds and baths.

  Educated Romans probably used a somewhat more refined idiom than the masses in the markets. However, the letters that the supreme stylist Cicero (106–43 B.C.) wrote to family and friends were so pocked with slang and sloppy grammatical mistakes (along the lines of “he did good”) that they horrified Re naissance translators. And consider the immortal words that a distinguished physician left behind, as recorded by Luca Canali and Guglielmo Cavallo in Graffiti latini: Scrivere sui muri a Roma antica. (Latin Graffitti: Writings on the Walls of Ancient Rome): “Apollinare, medico di Tito imperatore, in questo sito egregiamente cagò” (“Apollinare, the doctor of the emperor Tito, on this site shat splendidly”).

  The good doctor’s last word, cagò (defecate), has passed unchanged into contemporary Italian slang—as I learned from a little boy in Orbetello, a lively Tuscan village suspended between two lagoons that one enters through a still impressive Roman arch.

  “La signora è americana,” his grandmother explained to the lad as she and I discussed the ripeness of a watermelon (coco mero in the south, anguria in the north—and an insulting way to say “blockhead” throughout Italy).

  “Da Chi-cago?” (“From Chicago?”), he asked with a mischievous grin, and began giggling.

  “No,” I replied to the unexpected question as his blushing nonna hustled him away. The amused vendor explained that the name of America’s windy city sounds like “ci (pronunced chee) cago” (“I poop here”).

  Roman power and influence peaked in A.D. 117, when the empire stretched to Carthage, Egypt, Syria, Macedonia, Corsica, Gaul, the Iberian Peninsula, the British Isles, and east to what is now Iraq. With the gradual erosion of Roman might, classical Latin began to lose its status. In the far-flung territories, the Latin volgare evolved into local vernaculars. Eventually the dialect of the most powerful cities—Paris in France, Madrid in Spain, Lisbon in Portugal—elbowed aside other regional variations to become the national language. In Italy’s hodgepodge of warring city-states, the gap between the ways people wrote and spoke widened into a chasm. Classical Latin calcified into the lifeless language of church rituals and government documents, “a beautiful mummy,” as the linguist Ernst Pulgram describes it in The Tongues of Italy.

  To find out how the rapscallion vernacular, long relegated to the walls of brothels and bathrooms, somehow managed to usurp regal Latin, I arranged for a tutorial on the history of Italian at the Società Dante Alighieri in Florence. On a brisk spring day I made my way to the converted fifteenth-century cloister that now houses the school. My ebullient teacher, Cristina Romanelli, had served as a docent for a recent Uffizi exhibition on Italian’s history, “Dove Il Sì Suona” (“Where the Sì Doth Sound,” from Dante’s description of his “fair land” in the Divine Comedy). The moment I saw the stack of books and illustrations she’d prepared, I knew I had come to the right person at the right place—except that I’d secretly been hoping that Cristina would speak just a little English. She didn’t.

  Maybe that’s why Cristina provided so many visual aids to help me see the gradual transformation of a spoken tongue into a written language. Exhibit A was a page in the appendix of a grammar book from about A.D. 300. Unearthed from the ruins of a school near Rome’s Colosseum, it reveals the frustration of a teacher named Probus. With almost palpable irritation, he identifies 227 mistakes his pupils consistently made by substituting street words for the correct Latin terms. Calida, not calda (hot), he reprimanded his charges, aqua, not acqua (water), tabula, not tabla (table).

  “Povero!” Cristina sighs as we pore over a copy of the tattered Appendix Probi. The earnest instructor had fought a losing battle. The schoolboys’ slipshod errors, not his meticulous corrections, found a place in the evolving language. So did many others. Testa—slang for “pot” and an ancient insult—replaced the reputable Latin caput for “head.” Caballus, the vernacular for “nag,” upstaged the Latin equus and morphed into the modern Italian cavallo for “horse,” the root of “cavalry” and “cavalier.”

  About the same time, another revolutionary force, Christianity, was transforming the lives and language of Romans. Initially the church’s official tongue was Greek, but it switched to Latin about the year 350. However, long before then, novel religious concepts and forms of worship demanded new words, such as battesimo (baptism) and eucaristia (eucharist or Holy Communion), in the vernacular.

  Many existing Latin words t
ook on new meanings in the Christian era. Massa, for instance, meant nothing more than a lump of dough until St. Paul used it to refer to a group of people. Italian’s words for “word,” parola, and for “speaking,” parlare, derive from the Greek parabole (a comparison) and the intermediate Latin term parabola (for “parable,” a story with a moral lesson). When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire under Theodosius in 380, the prestige of the people’s tongue, spoken by the faithful of all classes, also rose.

  Neither words nor religion could protect Rome from the waves of barbarians who, beginning in the fifth century, swept over the peninsula and plunged the largest, strongest, and proudest of empires into darkness and silence. The Romans, who described their orderly style of warfare as bellum, couldn’t withstand the disorderly tactics of the Germans, whose werra (war) became the Italian guerra and the root of the English “guerrilla.”

  One of my college history professors used to refer to the bleak period that followed as “a thousand years without a bath.” In this dark and mirthless time, the only lights of intellectual enterprise burned in monasteries and abbeys, where men of God preserved early Western civilization by copying its classic works. The volgare had to fend for itself. Yet despite overwhelming odds, this orphan tongue not only survived but triumphed.

  The invaders’ Germanic dialects had little significant impact on the vernacular, beyond a motley assortment of words, including scherzare (to joke), ricco (rich), and russare (to snore). Some imports reflect the miseries the barbarians inflicted—gramo for “wretched,” scherno for “scorn,” smacco for “shame.” Others reveal the Romans’ contempt. Italian uses zanna, “tooth” in German, for an animal’s fang and stalla, German for “house,” for a horse stall or a pigsty. But one Gothic import remains ubiquitous. As we were tooling around Lago Maggiore many years ago, Bob asked me, “Who is this guy Albergo and why is his name on so many buildings?” I gently told him that albergo—from the Gothic haribergo for “military lodging”—means “hotel.”