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

by Dianne Hales

  Cristina produced another piece of evidence of the still scruffy vernacular’s encroachment into respectable territory: a template for confessing sins, an early form of the modern “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” Even though priests conducted religious services in Latin, she explained, they had to understand and be understood by their largely unschooled congregations. For this reason in 813 Charlemagne ordered prelates throughout Christendom to preach their sermons in the local idiom.

  To elevate their parishioners’ souls, some priests decided to add music to their services and composed religious lyrics with vernacular words set to the melodies of popular folk songs and dance tunes. Their congregations sang along zestfully—usually substituting the familiar, often raunchy words they already knew. The practice continued until the 1500s, when an outraged Council of Trent threatened to ban music entirely from Catholic liturgy.

  The task of convincing the reformers otherwise fell to Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c.1515–1594), who as a boy sang so sweetly on the streets of Rome while selling produce from his parents’ farm that a choirmaster from the church of Santa Maria Maggiore provided for his musical education. His polyphonic Missa Papae Marcelli (Mass of Pope Marcellus) convinced the ecclesiastical reformers of the edifying value of church music—and helped create Italian classical composition in the process.

  Clerics weren’t the only ones to acquire at least some functional knowledge of Latin in the Dark Ages. A new breed of professional scribes called notai served indispensable roles in preparing and copying official documents with what came to be known as the prized “fine Italian hand.” (Notai, not to be dismissed as glorified American-style notaries, remain crucial for almost any legal transaction in Italy today.) These shrewd men of business and law have long known a thing or two about treachery. To foil unscrupulous schemers who might add a codicil in a margin to alter a deed’s intent or terms, they filled the white space of official documents with elaborate doodles, whimsical verses, or brain-teasing puzzles—all in the homespun volgare. Some vented their rage with scorching colloquial invectives that still simmer on faded parchment. One, aimed at a Signore Caprotesta (Mr. Goathead), beseeched the devil to damn the miserable cuckold and his whore of a wife to hell.

  Cristina warns me that the most famous marginal musing may also strike me as a little bit crude. L’ indovinello di Verona, the riddle of Verona, was written some time in the 700s or 800s but only discovered in a liturgical book in 1924. Atop one of the pages, the author penned an enigmatic description of two oxen sowing black seed as they pull a plow forward over a white field. Rearranged in verse, the lines translate as:

  Leading oxen in front of him

  White fields he plowed

  A white plow he held

  A black seed he sowed.

  What did these curious, vaguely suggestive words mean? Were they part of a farmer’s song or some sort of agricultural treatise? The riddle was unraveled in 1925—thanks not to a linguistic archaeologist but to an Italian grandmother. During a lecture at the University of Bologna, a student, Ornella Castellani Pollidori, announced that she recognized this verse as one of the nursery rhymes her grandmother had taught her as a little girl. The dumbfounded professor listened with amazement as the young woman explained that the humped beasts were the knuckles of a writer’s hand holding a white quill pen that “sowed” a stream of black ink across a “field” of white paper.

  Cristina provided other “sightings” of the feisty vernacular—in battle accounts, business ledgers, crusaders’ letters, and an occasional serious musing on science or philosophy. But the great monument of early Italian, the first official document to include the volgare, didn’t appear until 960—Italian’s designated birth year. A court judgment called the Placito di Capua settled a property dispute between the monks of the famed Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino in central Italy and a neighbor who had filed a claim for a plot of adjacent land.

  After the official Latin summary of the case, the three judges repeated the verdict, granting the land to the monks on the basis of prior possession. Once Italian students memorized the historic words each judge scrawled in his own hand in a language that was no longer Latin but not yet Italian: “Sao ko kelle terre, per kelle fini qui ki contene, trenta anni le possette parte Sancti Benedicti.” “I know,” each judge wrote, “that the abbey of St. Benedict possessed these lands, within the borders to which this refers, for thirty years.”

  “Ero molto emozionata!” (“I was very excited”), Cristina tells me, recalling that tears flooded her eyes the first time she saw the original manuscript, which the abbey lent to the Uffizi for its exhibit on the Italian language. As she unfurls a copy of the oversize document before me, I can understand why. In the crude lettering and crooked lines of the three judges, you can sense a linguistic embryo stirring to life.

  The Placito di Capua marked a sea change for Italian. For the first time the people of the peninsula clearly realized they were speaking a language distinct from Latin. This vernacular came to be known as lingua materna, the mother tongue, while Latin, which students had to go to school to learn, was called la grammatica. Although Latin retained its monopoly on scholarship, law, medicine, and religious studies, higher education itself inspired Italian words, such as università (first defined as a corporation, then as a body of students), facoltà (faculty), and lettura (lecture).

  The number of recognized words in the mother tongue roughly tripled between the years 950 to 1300, from a mere 5,000 to an estimated 10,000 to 15,000. Their scribes snatched syllables out of thin air, writing what they heard exactly as the word sounded. Although the inhabitants of Bologna, Genoa, Venice, Salerno, Palermo, and other places contributed some widely used words, the resourceful Tuscans proved the most creative in inventing names for whatever new concepts, techniques, materials, and diversions the volatile times demanded.

  Of course, Italians first had to name themselves. Ancient Romans, such as Gaius Julius Caesar and Marcus Tullius Cicero, bore three names: a basic first name, a clan name, and also a family name that was handed down. By medieval times, the latter two names disappeared and people were known by only one name, which became confusing as the population grew and the Marios and Marias multiplied. And so 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” (the nickname later given to the artist Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better known as Sandro Botticelli, whose brother made barrels). 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”). Orphans, abandoned anonymously on church or convent steps, were given names such as Esposito, meaning “exposed” from the Latin for “placed outside,” Poverelli for “poor little ones,” Trovatelli for “little foundlings,” or Orfanelli for “little orphans.”

  The bearer of the sinister name Guido Bevisangue (Drink-blood) came by this moniker in a particularly horrific way. The story starts with a guy named Guido, who married the pretty, virtuous daughter of the Duke of Ravenna. Their son, setting himself up as Ravenna’s lord, debauched the wives of the town’s leading families. The local men rose up and massacred the licentious ruler and his entire family, except for an infant named Guido, who was away with a wet nurse. When he reached manhood, Guido wreaked such fierce revenge on the people of Ravenna that he became known as Bevisangue for his repulsive habit of licking the blood of his many victims from his sword.

  A string of grandsons, all called Guidoguerra, fought staunchly in a seemingly endless series of bloody conflicts. One of these skillful warriors became political counselor to Matilda, the gran contessa of Tuscany (1048–1115), an armor-wearin
g, horse-riding regent who ruled over a vast state in central Italy. Her castle at Canossa earned a place in the history of the Italian language in 1077. After years of conflict with Pope Gregory VII, the German king Henry IV crossed the Alps in winter to appear outside its gates as a barefoot penitent seeking absolution from Matilda’s papal guest. Gregory kept the emperor waiting three days below the snow-swept castle before agreeing to see him. To this day the phrase andare a Canossa (to go to Canossa) means to humble oneself in a dispute.

  The vernacular might have retained its second-class linguistic status if not for the inspiration of the romantic songs of the Provençal troubadours. While Italy was still finding its tongue, these roving entertainers were traveling from court to court in southern France, serenading the ladies of the castles (many with husbands away on crusades) with lilting odes to their beauty and grace.

  The troubadours of Provence inspired the earliest composition in Italian that can be called literary—the ritmo laurenziano, twenty rhyming lines scrawled on the last page of a manuscript now in Florence’s Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, the glorious Medici Library. Writing in a script typical of the late-twelfth or early-thirteenth century, a minstrel heaped praise on the archbishop of Pisa, lauding him as worthy of elevation to the papacy. His ulterior motive was persuading the prelate to give him a horse. The minstrel promised that if he did so he would show it to the bishop of nearby Volterra—although whether to impress or irritate isn’t clear.

  Growing up in a Catholic family, I learned about the value of currying a bishop’s favor. However, I found the colorful stories of the saints far more appealing. The children’s favorite was St. Francis of Assisi (1181–1226), if only because we could bring our pets to church for a blessing on his feast day. Yet this beloved saint, renowned for his rapport with all God’s creatures, didn’t start out on a godly path.

  When his French-born wife gave birth to a son who was christened Giovanni, Pietro di Bernardone, a wool merchant in Assisi, renamed him Francesco as a tribute to her and to the country he most admired. A sickly but charming child, Francesco became the ringleader of a group of fun-loving, hard-drinking, spoiled young men. According to his first biographer, he had the distinction of acting “even more stupidly than the rest.” Among the young playboy’s delights were the charming chansons of Provence, which had migrated to Italy.

  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. Over a period of several years, he pulled away from his rowdy gang to meditate in the mountains and pray in the dilapidated chapel of San Damiano in Assisi. One day Francesco heard the figure of Christ on the crucifix above the altar instruct him, “Repair my house, which you see is in ruins.”

  Francesco sold his horse and his father’s finest cloth and tried to give the proceeds to the pastor. His incensed father charged him with theft. At a public hearing before the bishop of Assisi, Francesco returned the money to his father—along with every stitch of clothing he was wearing. As the naked youth explained to the bishop, he now had only a heavenly father.

  Devoted to “his bride,” Lady Poverty, Francesco renounced all earthly possessions and formed a religious order of “begging brothers.” They built simple huts around the chapel, known as the Porziuncola, for little portion of land. A grand church now rises above this tiny structure, which remains one of the most sacred places I’ve ever visited.

  Wearing the crude brown robes of the poorest Umbrian beggars, the Lord’s troubadours wandered the countryside chanting God’s praises in songs called laudes that Francesco wrote in the Umbrian dialect. Even animals responded to his heartfelt words. When a gargantuan wolf terrorized the town of Gubbio, the friar approached the beast. The wolf lunged at him, but Francesco stood his ground and entreated him not to eat “Brother Ass” (as he referred to his body). The wolf, curling up at his feet, promised not to attack the townspeople, who provided food for the animal at the gates of their city for the rest of its life. In the town of Greccio near Assisi, Francesco brought a real ox and donkey into the church at Christmastime to create the first live crèche or Nativity scene.

  Despite chronic health problems, including an eye infection that eventually blinded him, Francesco delighted in being a child of the universe. His Canticle of the Creatures—which one translator describes as “the first real knock-your-socks-off masterpiece of Italian poetry”—celebrates with innocent wonder Master Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Sister Water, Brother Fire, and Mother Earth. Although it was probably meant to be sung, the tune was lost. However, lines like these capture its melodic spirit:

  Be praised, my Lord, for Sister Moon and stars

  in heaven you formed them—lovely, precious, clear.

  Be praised, my Lord, for Brother Wind and air,

  and every kind of weather, cloudy and fair,

  by which you give your creatures what they need.

  Be praised, my Lord, be praised for Sister Water—

  she is so useful, precious, chaste, and humble.

  (D’Epiro and Pinkowish, Sprezzatura, p. 76)

  With this verse—comprehensible in its original language to contemporary Italians—the humblest of saints raised the humble vernacular to a heavenly height. Francesco remains almost a living presence in the hill town of Assisi, where I returned twice to study Italian—once before the 1997 earthquake damaged the cycle of twenty-eight frescoes, painted by Giotto and his followers, in the Basilica di San Francesco and once a few years later. In a Holy Week concert beneath the lovingly restored works, I smiled at a little girl who commented—rather astutely, I thought—that it seemed as if the angels and saints on the ceiling were actually singing.

  If Francesco was medieval Italy’s most famous saint, Federico II (1194–1250), head of the Holy Roman Empire and the kingdom of Sicily, who doubted the existence of an afterlife and dared to defy a string of popes, was its most infamous sinner. As a flame-haired boy of three, Federico inherited the kingdom of Sicily. Eventually he expanded his territory to the north, east, and west, and declared himself Holy Roman Emperor despite the pope’s threat of excommunication. His peripatetic Magna Curia (Great Court) traveled throughout Sicily and southern Italy, always with a caravan of mules toting the emperor’s beloved books.

  Hailed as Stupor Mundi, or wonder of the world, Federico reportedly spoke more than half a dozen languages. The works of the French troubadours’ rhymes so impressed the monarch that he launched a literary revolution. Renouncing Latin’s assumed supremacy, Federico established the first formal school for vernacular poetry at his court. This cutting-edge salon concocted a new language, a blend of many southern dialects. The brightest of its stars, Giacomo da Lentini, developed the first sonnet (sonetto, from the Provençal “sonet,” or “little poem”), one of the most enduring and endearing literary forms. His best-known poem began with the delectable word meravellosamente (meravigliosamente in modern Italian, for “wonderfully”), which is how love seized him.

  According to Il novellino, a late-thirteenth-century collection of anecdotes, Federico was a generous patron whose court attracted “all sorts of people”—judges, politicians, learned men, musicians, eloquent speakers, artists, jousters, swordsmen, and exotic dancers from Middle Eastern states. Curious about everything, Federico posed questions such as “How does God sit on his throne?” and “What do the angels and saints do in his presence?” Considered the father of ornithology, he wrote The Art of Hunting with Birds, a treatise still read and admired by falconers; founded the first state-funded library at Naples; supported the medical schools at Palermo and Salerno; and maintained a lavish menagerie for studies in animal breeding.

  In De vulgari eloquentia, his treatise on language, Dante exalted the “nobility and righteousness” of Federico and his son Manfredo. “In their time,” he wrote, “whatever the best Italians a
ttempted, first appeared at the court of these mighty sovereigns.” Nonetheless, in canto 10 of the Inferno, Dante damns Federico to a fiery tomb with other heretics who denied the existence of life after death.

  A self-styled scientist as well as poet, Federico conducted one of the earliest—and cruelest—experiments in language acquisition. Curious about which tongue infants would speak if they were exposed to none, the emperor ordered complete silence among those caring for several newborns. The babies, starved of human sound, all died. In another ghoulish experiment, Federico reportedly had a man suffocated in a sealed barrel to see whether his soul could be observed leaving the container.

  Federico clashed repeatedly with a string of popes, who excommunicated, deposed, denounced, and allegedly tried to poison him. The fierce ongoing power struggle between his imperial party, the Ghibellines, and the papal faction, the Guelfs, triggered the bloody conflicts that convulsed Italy’s city-states for decades. Federico died of dysentery in southern Italy in 1250. When Pope Innocent IV announced his death, he declared, “Let us rejoice and be glad!” The congregation shouted, “Down to hell he went!” According to Sicilian legend, devils carried Federico’s soul through Mount Etna into the inferno.

  Taking a different direction, the freshly minted language of Federico’s court drifted north to Florence, the Latin name of which means “flourish.” It was about to do just that. In the thirteenth century, this thriving boomtown blossomed into the economic and cultural center of the medieval world, the greatest money market in Europe, second only to Paris in population and prominence. The citizens of this cultural hothouse would invent the Renaissance, which, as Mary McCarthy observed, “is the same as saying that they invented the modern world.”