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

by Dianne Hales

  For centuries Florentines, prickly by nature, had fought their fiercest battles among themselves. Pugnacious clans routinely slaughtered each other on street corners and razed each other’s houses and fortified towers. Prosperity, which demanded an end to such carnage, forced Florentines—described by a historian of the times as colti (educated), benestanti (well off), and litigiosi (quarrelsome)—to channel their hostility into less bruising forms of dispute such as public debates and private litigation. A twelfth-century census recorded ten times as many lawyers and notai as doctors and surgeons.

  From dawn into darkness Florence’s narrow streets echoed with words. Heralds on horseback proclaimed decrees and death sentences. Vendors hawked their wares, criers called out for wet nurses and laborers, minstrels sang, and friars chanted praises to God. The quick-witted townspeople turned daily dialogues into verbal jousts, while aggrieved citizens aired their complaints at the “harangue site” in front of Palazzo Vecchio, the town hall.

  Traders transporting silks, spices, salt, and other prized commodities from the Middle East brought currencies to exchange in Florence. As their businesses grew, local money changers expanded from tables to counters called banchi, the origins of the word “bank.” In 1250 the city coin, the florin, nicknamed Messer Fiorino, with the image of its patron saint, John the Baptist, on one side, became the currency of Europe. The founding families of the Florentine banks, which loaned millions of florins to popes, kings, and princes, turned into medieval Midases.

  Florence’s craftsmen, organized into guilds called arti, set new standards for innovation and workmanship. Its wool and silk businesses dressed and draped the courts of Europe. The best catalog of the city’s prospering trades comes from its streets, named for the makers of the pointy-toed footwear seen in Renaissance paintings (Calzaioli), wool carders (Cardatori), the vats of cloth dyers (Caldaie), metalworkers who produced silver thread for sumptuous fabrics (Ariento), tanneries (Conce), and buckle makers (Fibbiai). Woodworkers may have earned Via Chiucchiurlaia its appellation as Noisy Street—although many others probably qualified.

  To this day fiorentinità signifies taste, quality, and the world’s finest leather goods and items, such as the handcrafted boxes of inlaid wood, metal, and stone that I collect. I purchased my latest acquisition, a hinged box of yellow Siena marble with inlays of pietra dura (hard stone) and various minerals, at the Galleria Romanelli, which has been in business since 1860. The grandfather of the current owner, the sculptor Folco Romanelli, carved the bust of the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini that sits on the Ponte Vecchio, where my daughter, Julia, and I would pause to listen to impromptu concerts on summer evenings.

  After starting our conversation in Italian, the salesclerk and I switched to our native English (mine American, hers British). When I told her about my book project, she compared the local language to Tuscan bread—simple and unsalted, so it soaked up all sorts of rich and pungent sauces. As I left, she added that I should have seen Florence fifty years ago, when she first arrived and “all the interesting people were still alive.”

  I wondered about her lamented acquaintances’ current location when I crossed the river to the intersection of Via dell’Inferno and Via del Purgatorio. Neither was named for their place in Dante’s Divine Comedy but for competing wineshops or inns, one a hell and the other a purgatory. 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.

  One of Florence’s oldest streets, Via Burella, dates back to Roman times, when its underground chambers housed both prisoners and wild animals, all of whom would fight in the local amphitheater. Dante used burella in his Divine Comedy to describe a dark cell, “ill-floored and scant of light.” In medieval times, cheap wine cellars and brothels lined Via Burella. More upscale pleasure-seekers strolled to the Via delle Belle Donne (Street of the Pretty Women), where amorous beauties displayed their charms.

  Not surprisingly, a city with such sonorous street names boasted the highest literacy rate in Europe. About 30 percent of Florentine men could read and write Latin. Yet the city’s brash young writers preferred playing with their vibrant vernacular. Inspired by the Sicilians’ lyrical verses, which had been “Tuscanized” by scribes as they made their way north, the Florentines perfected a sweet new style (dolce stil nuovo) for love poetry. The sole woman among them, known as Compiuta Donzella (almost certainly a pen name), left behind a single sad poem about being forced to marry a man she did not love.

  For my father has wronged me …

  he wishes to give me a husband against my will.

  And I have no wish or desire for that

  And spend every hour in great torment

  So that no joy comes to me from either flower or leaf.

  (Kay, The Penguin Book of Italian Verse, p. 52)

  Although the sweet new stylists mainly explored the spiritual and psychological nature of love, the red-blooded Tuscan men couldn’t resist coarser themes, as in these lines:

  When you find yourself alone with her

  Take her in your arms confidently,

  Showing then how strong and hard you are,

  Then shove the peg in.

  (Usher, “Origins and Duecento,” p. 7)

  Some speculate that the author of this bawdy lyric was none other than the young Dante Alighieri, who could wield a pen as aggressively as a sword. In the medieval equivalent of modern online “flaming,” his quick-witted contemporaries exchanged barbs and taunts grievous enough to provoke long feuds. After actual battles, they circulated insulting verses about their defeated foes—and sometimes acted them out. When they won the battle of Campaldino, in which Dante fought, the Florentines threw thirty dead jackasses with bishop’s miters (representing Arezzo’s fighting prelate) over the town walls.

  Dante, who would be driven at midlife from friends, family, and Florence, abandoned rambunctious versifying for a far more ambitious mission. He consciously set out to craft an “illustrious” language, illuminated and illuminating, that would be worthy of a great court and government—if any was ever to emerge in his battered peninsula. 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.

  But the medieval poet with whom I feel the most personal bond is Cecco Angiolieri of Siena (1260–1312), who accomplished a feat that had frustrated many of my earlier tutors: teaching me the tricky two-tense combination required for an Italian “hypothetical.” Although Cristina originally introduced me to his poetry for purely historical reasons, she mentioned that one verse in particular could serve as a how-to for hypotheticals. It begins with the memorable line “Se i’ fosse foco, arderei il mondo” and translates as,

  If I were fire, I’d burn up the world.

  If I were wind, I’d storm it. If I were water, I’d drown it.

  If I were God, I’d send it into the abyss.

  After venting more rage in this string of if-onlys, the volatile Angiolieri concludes with a twist:

  If I were Cecco, as I am and was,

  I would take all the women who are young and gay

  And leave the old and ugly to other men.

  (Kay, The Penguin Book of Italian Verse, p. 70)

  As a tribute to Cecco’s feisty spirit, I taught my husband, Bob, a seemingly straightforward hypothetical phrase that actually requires some fancy grammatical footwork: “If I were to study Italian more, I would speak it better.” “Se io studiassi di più l’italiano, lo parlerei meglio.” Every time this intricate phrase slides smoothly off his tongue, Italians practically give him a standing ovation. I silently take a bow and think of Cecco, burning up the world with his words.

  IT WAS DISLIKE AT FIRST SIGHT. EVERYTHING about Dante Alighieri put me o
ff. As artists traditionally portrayed him, the medieval poet seemed a ferocious grump with a big beak, jutted chin, petulant sneer, and hooded eyes. His brooding face glowered at me everywhere I turned in Italy—in classrooms, museums, civic halls, even on a tapestry in the parlor of the cozy apartment that I rent in Rome and a pedestal in a suite named for his muse Beatrice in the palazzo in Florence where I stay. Although writers like William Blake learned Italian just to read Dante, I resisted. The Divine Comedy seemed too daunting, too distant, too terribly fourteenth century.

  Then Paola Sensi-Isolani, a Florence-born literature professor at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California, showed me a copy of the first adaptation of La Divina Commedia that she read as a girl of eight: a vintage Italian Walt Disney comic book featuring Mickey Mouse (Topolino in Italian) as Dante with Minnie Mouse as his adored Beatrice. A bicycle-riding Goofy stands in for Virgil, the great Roman poet, who guides Dante through the perils of the Inferno. On the final page, Mickey, Minnie, and Donald Duck (in a deus ex machina appearance) beam from a cloud in paradise.

  This whimsical treatment of a stirring adventure tale made me think that I may have been wrong about Dante. I’m not the only one. Much of what the experts known as dantisti long assumed about the seven-hundred-something-year-old writer has proven wrong—right down to the hallmark hook in his nose. A few years ago researchers at the University of Bologna completed a meticulous reconstruction of Dante’s face, based on drawings, actual historical measurements of his skull, and 3D computer technology. According to their calculations, Dante was quite ordinary-looking, with large eyes, a rounded jaw, and a pudgy nose that might have been punched and broken.

  I decided to observe this noted nasone (big nose) firsthand by booking a table for dinner at Florence’s chic Alle Murate restaurant in the Palazzo dell’Arte dei Giudici e Notai (Palace of the Guild of Judges and Notai). On the walls of this former meeting hall, restorers found large sections of frescoes, one depicting Dante as a young man in the company of other revered writers. In between courses, my daughter and I listened to an audiotaped account of the discovery of the oldest known portrait of the poet. After dinner, we climbed the stairs to stand almost nose to nose with Dante’s image. Without doubt, his beak—presumably pre-punch—is long and smooth. Yet not even here does Dante smile. As photographs of his death mask attest, the grand poet died as he lived: frowning. He had good reason.

  Scholars have quibbled over many facts of Dante’s life—the year of his birth (the current consensus is 1265), his name (he was christened Durante—yes, as in Jimmy), and whether or not his mother’s death early in his life and his father’s remarriage plunged him into an unhappy childhood. Once they assumed that his muse, Beatrice (whose name can mean “blessed” or “bringer of blessings”), was a fantasy or symbol of grace on earth. But she was real, a daughter of the distinguished Portinari family. Dante first glimpsed her in La Badia, one of Florence’s sweetest chapels, where lovers still leave flowers and notes at Beatrice’s tomb.

  Despite Dante’s unrequited, undying crush, the two rarely met and barely spoke. Both entered arranged marriages. Dante’s wife, Gemma, bore him at least three children, but neither she nor his offspring merit a single mention in his works. After Beatrice’s death, probably in childbirth in 1290, Dante swore “to write of her what has never been written of another woman.” This he certainly did, transforming the literary image of woman from evil temptress to tenderhearted, soul-saving redeemer.

  But Dante could use words to wound as well. He once published sonnets claiming that a friend’s wife coughed incessantly in church because of his failure to satisfy her in the bedroom. In reply, the irate husband denounced Dante as an abject coward who when confronted by a family enemy defecated in his pants an amount such that “two packhorses could not carry it.” 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.

  Drawn to Florence’s raucous political life, Dante relinquished his familial claims to nobility and enrolled in the apothecaries’ guild. (Writers somehow qualified, possibly by their use of ink.) The Guelfs, supporters of the papacy, had driven the pro-imperial Ghibellines from Italy, but then divided into two factions: Blacks and Whites. Dante, as a White Guelf, served as a commissioner of public works. Because he vetoed so many projects, his colleagues called him Nihil Fiat, Latin for “Do nothing,” his standard recommendation.

  In 1301 during Dante’s term as one of the town’s priors, or city councilmen, civil war ripped Florence apart. The Blacks hunted down and slaughtered the leaders of the Whites. In Rome on a papal mission, Dante escaped the bloodbath but faced trumped-up charges of misuse of public funds. The Blacks sentenced Dante and 350 other Whites—the party’s intellectual elite—to lifetime exile and razed their houses, reducing central Florence to ashes. If Dante ever were to return, he would be burned to death—and, his political foes later decreed, so would his sons when they turned fifteen.

  Everything Dante had worked for and earned—every shred of dignity, security, comfort, influence, and respect—disappeared overnight. At age thirty-six, he was penniless, friendless, powerless, homeless—as he put it, “a ship without sails or rudder, driven to various harbors and shores by the parching wind that blows from pinching poverty.”

  Wandering through the hostile countryside, Dante would hang his hat on a peg in the center of a new town and trade his services for a meal and a roof—if only in a barn or stable—for the night. For a while Dante joined with other White Guelfs in plots of vengeance, but eventually declared himself a party of one. Cursing politicians of every sort, he derided his countrymen as filthy pigs.

  Around 1307 Dante began work on what he called La Commedia (designated a comedy because it begins in sadness and ends in happiness). No one has pulled off a comparable literary tour de force before or since. “When I taught high school students, I’d get them interested in Dante by talking about the artistic technique of rock musicians, their amazing ability to play so many notes so fast and furiously,” says Giuseppe Patota, professor of the history of the Italian language at the Univesity of Siena-Arezzo. “Dante wrote poetry the way a rock star plays guitar.”

  The medieval virtuoso composed 14,233 eleven-syllable lines organized into one hundred cantos in three volumes: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Rejecting Latin as too elitist and regional dialects (including his native Tuscan) as inadequate, Dante fashioned a lustrous new vernacular to portray a fantastic universe that stretched from the depths of hell to the heights of heaven. A word that Dante concocted best describes how he wrote: sovramagnificentissimamente, in a very, very, very magnificent way.

  In Dante’s braided rhyme scheme, called terza rima, the first and third lines of every three-line terzina rhyme, and the second line rhymes with the first line of the next terzina. As a final fillip, the last line of the last canto of every volume ends with the same word: stelle (stars). Perhaps most remarkable of all, Dante imagined his entire glorious epic, more than 100,000 words from beginning to end, before he set quill to parchment. In this masterwork, Italian, nationless and motherless, found a father.

  If I was really to understand both Italian and Italians, I realized that I had to understand Dante. Although tempted to start with contemporary cartoon adaptations, I bought an English translation of the Divine Comedy—several, in fact, although I’m partial to John Ciardi’s. My unanticipated reaction: Wow! Like modern readers ensnared by the wizardly world of Harry Potter, I skidded into a fully imagined alternate world. An action-packed, high-adrenaline, breathtaking, rip-roaring yarn leapt off the pages into vivid, writhing, pulsating life.

  “Certo,” says the filmmaker Gianfranco Angelucci, who collaborated on screenplays with Fellini, the most Dantesque of modern directors, when we meet in Rome. “Dante was a born screenwriter. If he were alive today, he would be making movies far more fantastic than anything Hollywood has ever created
.”

  Just consider the basic plot of La Commedia (a publisher in Venice added “Divina” later): Beginning on Good Friday eve in the year 1300, Dante—or “the pilgrim,” as scholars refer to his first-person narrator—loses his way in a dark wood, travels deep into the earth, and enters a funnel-shaped hell with nine concentric circles spiraling down into an icy center. “Abandon hope, all you who enter here,” reads its infamous welcome sign.

  In this abyss of darkness and fright, the pilgrim sees and mentions by name 128 sinners and converses with 37 of them, meets thirty monsters, takes two hair-raising boat rides, faints twice, and witnesses the damned being whipped, bitten, crucified, burned, butchered, deformed by repulsive diseases, transformed into shrubs and snakes, buried alive in flaming graves, skewered into rocky ground, frozen in ice, and immersed in mud, excrement, boiling blood, or pitch.

  His adventures assail every sense. Crossing steep slopes and thunderous waterfalls, the pilgrim endures terrible heat, bitter cold, and never-ceasing fiery rain. He beholds the fearsome sight of a river of blood carrying the bodies of the violent, with centaurs shooting arrows into those who dare raise their heads. He recoils from the disgusting stench of the marsh of the river Styx, where the sullen, mouths clogged with foul slime, lament endlessly.

  The cast of memorable characters includes Hell’s “staff” of giants, harpies, hybrids, and devils with fabulously depraved names such as Scarmiglione, Calcabrina, and Draghignazzo. Italian schoolchildren still relish the sheer naughty delight of Dante’s description of Malacoda (Rotten Tail), the beastly leader of an army of devils who summons his wretched troops to battle by famously “making a trumpet of his ass” and farting. But in the Inferno the “beast that stinks up the world” is Fraud, who sports the face of a friendly man atop a body that is part winged hairy mammal and part reptile, with a long tail ending in a scorpion’s stinger.