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

by Dianne Hales

  In 1865, in its infancy as a nation and in desperate need of heroes, Italy prepared to celebrate Dante’s six hundredth birthday. A worker opening a hole between two chapels in the Ravenna church chanced upon a wooden box, half decomposed by the damp. Inside lay an almost complete skeleton, along with an official statement from a past prior of the monastery, testifying that these were Dante’s bones, which he had hidden to protect them from the arrogant Florentines and the Medici pope. Dante’s remains now lie in a small marble shrine, in Ravenna. Every year, on the anniversary of the poet’s death, the comune of Firenze sends oil from the Tuscan hills to light the votive lamp that hangs above his tomb.

  However, the real memorial to Italy’s premier poet lies in the hearts and minds of his countrymen. In his memoir of imprisonment in the concentration camp at Auschwitz in World War II, the great Italian writer Primo Levi recalls reciting from memory a canto from La Divina Commedia to a young man who wanted to learn Italian. As he pronounced the poet’s words, Levi felt that he too was hearing them for the first time, “like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God. For a moment I forgot who we were and where we were.” Dante miraculously shone rays of beauty into an especially dismal ring of hell.

  Just about every Italian I know can recite at least a few verses from the Divine Comedy. In the past, people of every station in life committed huge chunks to memory. Professor Sensi-Isolani illustrates this point with another anecdote from the Second World War: A partisan shepherd in Tuscany was ordered to shoot anyone who couldn’t identify himself without doubt as an Italian. One night he stopped a professor biking outside Pisa after curfew without any identification documents. The partisan asked the scholar to prove his identity by reciting the seventeenth canto of the Inferno. He got to line 117 but couldn’t remember the rest. The shepherd finished the canto for him.

  On my last trip to Florence, I spent several hours in the Casa di Dante, a reconstructed medieval dwelling that may or may not have been the actual site of the poet’s birth. The exhibits, which include a typical bedroom of the time, a plastic model of the battle against Arezzo in which Dante fought, numerous documents from his exile, and reproductions of art inspired by the Divine Comedy, imparts only a vague sense of the man and his life. But on the top floor, I found a continuously playing multimedia show that combines a taped reading of selected cantos with slides of Gustave Doré’s fantastical nineteenth-century illustrations of the Divine Comedy.

  Sitting alone, the sun filtering in through narrow windows, I stopped trying to translate the verses and surrendered to the tidal surge of Dante’s words, the throbbing force that brings the language to life. As richly detailed images of suffering sinners and sanctified saints filled my eyes, Dante’s rhythmic Italian rushed straight to my soul. I have no idea how long I sat there, but at the soaring end of the Paradiso, I felt that I had indeed been swept to hell and back. The only word that describes the feeling comes, of course, from Dante: imparadisata, or lifted into heaven.

  FOR YEARS I BARELY GLANCED AT THE WHITE marble busts of Italy’s grandi that line the shady paths of Rome’s Pincio, the gardens above the Piazza del Popolo. But midway through a morning jog, I paused in front of Dante’s austere visage. On nearby statues I recognized the names of other masters of Italian letters. Authors I’d known only from my readings materialized into three dimensions.

  “So you really were chubby!” I thought as I beheld Boccaccio’s sly grin and pudgy face. Petrarch, smug as I’d suspected, sported the poet’s laurel crown he’d won mainly by dint of shameless self-promotion. With his curly hair, high cheekbones, and brawny shoulders, Leon Battista Alberti, the consummate Renaissance man, clearly qualified as the hunky centerfold of the lot, while the impressive size of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s nose was itself magnificent.

  I’ve come to think of these literary lions with genuine affection as “my guys.” (If a woman sits atop any of the Pincio’s pedestals, I have yet to find her.) They’ve had a rough time of it in Rome. Vandals break off the noses of the Pincio statues so often that a local sculptor reportedly works full-time replacing them. Pollution and pigeons have stained their bases. Graffiti—silly black mustaches, horns (for Italians the mark of a cuckold), chilling swastikas—scar most of the faces. On my last trip to Rome bloodred paint coated Lorenzo’s head and dripped down his neck.

  My guys deserve better. These heroes of Italian’s history did more than change the way their countrymen spoke and wrote. Over the course of two centuries, by bridging the gap between medieval and modern times, they changed forever the way the world thinks.

  Italians refer to the trio of their most esteemed writers—the supreme genius Dante, the beguiling storyteller Giovanni Boccaccio, and the poetic purist Francesco Petrarca, whom we know as Petrarch—as le tre corone (the three crowns). Thanks to this trinity of talent, the fourteenth century still glows as the golden age of Italian literature. “That one city should have produced three such men, and that one half-century should have witnessed their successive triumphs, forms the great glory of Florence,” the historian John Addington Symonds wrote in Renaissance in Italy, “and is one of the most notable facts in the history of genius.”

  If I had to be stranded in a snowstorm with one of these authors, my hands-down choice would be Boccaccio. No one could spin a better yarn. Every raconteur since—from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Dickens to Twain—stands in this spell weaver’s debt.

  I took to easygoing Boccaccio the moment I heard his disarming nickname: Giovanni della Tranquillità. He was born in 1313—the year of the Inferno’s publication—and became Dante’s first biographer, commentator, and public reader. Unlike Dante, who descended from an old and distinguished family, Boccaccio was the illegitimate son of a merchant, one of the newly rich Florentines. His prosperous father brought the boy into his household and arranged an apprenticeship with the Naples branch of his bank.

  Boccaccio was a disaster, as completely unsuited for accounting as I would be (another reason I feel a bond with him). At his father’s urging, he switched to law, which turned out to be another mismatch of temperament and talent. All Boccaccio wanted to do was write, eat (he was a lifelong buona forchetta, or big eater), and chase women. He fathered two illegitimate children in Naples and another in Ravenna. But the unattainable woman he pined for was “Fiammetta” (little flame), the inspiration of his early writings.

  Boccaccio might have ambled good-naturedly through life, but fate blindsided him. His father’s bank collapsed. Fiammetta shattered his heart. In 1348 the Great Pestilence killed a quarter of Florence’s citizens, including his stepmother and numerous friends. Although he never sought the assignment, Boccaccio became the foremost chronicler of Florence’s plague years.

  So swiftly and fiercely did this deadly disease strike, he recounts, that robust young men and women breakfasted with their parents at home in the morning and dined with their ancestors in the afterlife by night. Doctors and priests fell alongside those they tended. For a price men called becchini, for grave diggers, now the word for undertakers, carried away bodies, sometimes stacking the corpses of children atop their parents, to bury in pits without so much as a final blessing. Many believed this devastation foreshadowed the end of the world.

  Boccaccio’s antidote to the daily horror was the most exuberant, entertaining, death-defying work of literature the world had seen. In the Decameron, Italian’s first great prose narrative, a group of seven young women and three young men taking refuge in a country villa swap one hundred tales—called novelle, for “news or novelty”—of love, lust, mischief, and treachery. As Boccaccio’s “merry brigade” (lieta brigata, a description one of my teachers used for a particularly congenial conversation group) demonstrated, the omnipresent threat of death intensifies the love of life.

  I started reading a translation of the Decameron during Bob’s summerlong sabbatical in Italy in 2001. As we traipsed from village to village I’d look around a piazza and see characters straight from his pages: w
ily merchants, corrupt politicians, clever wives, henpecked husbands, and bumbling fools.

  Every town, I discovered, has an unfortunate simpleton like Calandrino. In the Decameron, two of Boccaccio’s pranksters, Bruno and Buffalmacco, convince Calandrino that he has found a magic stone, which they call a heliotrope (also the name of a plant with purplish flowers), that makes people invisible. They then casually shag pebbles at the spot where the “invisible” Calandrino is standing. In another beffa, or prank, they get him drunk, steal his pig, and make him pay for an elaborate lie-detecting test to prove he’s the thief. When the two convince the buffoon that he is pregnant, he blames his wife, Tessa, for insisting on being on top during sex. Calandrino ends up turning over all of a recent inheritance to procure an abortion. Then the jokers get him in hot water with Tessa by arranging for her to find him in a haystack with a young girl.

  While no sin goes unpunished in the Divine Comedy, I was glad to see that many of Boccaccio’s irascible characters get off with a wink and a smile. Take Filippa, whose husband caught her with a lover in Prato, which condemned adulterers to the stake. At her trial, she asks her husband if she had ever denied him sex. No, he concedes.

  “Well, then, what should I have done with the extra—thrown it to the dogs?” she demands. “Isn’t it better that a noble gentleman who loves me more than himself should have it, instead of it being lost or wasted?” Roaring in laughter, the towns-people repeal their harsh statute. In another story, an abbess catches a nun in bed with a man. The young woman deftly defuses her superior’s wrath by pointing out that, in her rush to get dressed, the abbess mistakenly threw the blacks pants of her lover (a priest) over her head instead of her veil.

  Like most Italian men, Boccaccio had, at least in his youth, a romantic streak, which shows in his sweetest tale, that of Federigo and his falcon. This young Florentine spends his entire fortune trying to win the heart of a wealthy married woman, the virtuous Monna Giovanna. After her husband dies, the widow’s young son falls grievously ill and entreats her for the one thing he thinks would make him well—Federigo’s prized bird. Desperate, Monna Giovanna, planning to beg for the falcon, arrives at Federigo’s house at lunchtime. In a twist that foreshadows O. Henry’s touching “The Gift of the Magi,” Federigo, embarrassed that he has no food to offer her, kills his prized falcon, roasts it on a spit, and serves it. Monna Giovanna’s son dies, but when she learns of Federigo’s selfless deed, she marries him—thereby making him rich again. “Better a man in need of riches,” she decides, “than riches in need of a man.”

  Boccaccio’s prose rivaled Dante’s poetry in its range, stretching Italian from the highest to the lowest levels. His cornici, the luxuriously ornamented introductions that serve as the framework for the Decameron, are supremely elegant. Contrary to the common perception, only about a quarter of his tales have bawdy themes, but these sparkle with such earthy vitality that Italian coined the word boccaccesco to describe a spicy story.

  I didn’t fully appreciate this genre until I read my way in Italian to the tenth tale of the third day. Suddenly I thought of the U.S. Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, who famously declared that while he might not be able to define pornography, he knew it when he saw it. I wasn’t sure what boccaccesco was exactly, but I certainly recognized its raciness—and finally fathomed the knowing wink that accompanied Italian jokes about “putting the devil in hell.” In this lighthearted tale, a young hermit, instructing a beautiful but naïve young girl, convinces her that she could best serve God by putting the devil, springing to life in his penis, into “hell,” her dark and warm inferno. In a typically boccaccesco spin, the girl becomes so devoted to this form of worship that she wears the poor man out.

  Boccaccio’s zesty stories spread as swiftly as the contagion that inspired them. However, their author came to scorn them, along with the Italian vernacular, and chose instead to write turgid tomes in Latin. His girth grew, and his health deteriorated. After two marriages and countless liaisons, his love life soured to such an extent that Boccaccio derided all women in a misogynist treatise. Perhaps under the influence of religious extremists, he despaired of his literary merit and considered burning his works and his library. Petrarch stopped him.

  This act is not the only reason we have for being in the poet’s debt. The acclaimed thinker and writer has been described as the first humanist, father of the Renaissance, and the first modern man. His Florentine father, an ally of Dante’s, was exiled in the same political purge of the White Guelfs. Born in 1304 in Arezzo, Petrarch spent many years near Avignon, home of the exiled papacy from 1309 to 1377, where both father and (eventually) son worked in various church offices.

  Before being lured to Italy, Bob and I often vacationed in the countryside around Avignon, a town that always struck me as cosmopolitan and urbane. Petrarch certainly was both. Although he took clerical vows that prohibited marriage, he fathered at least two children. A man of the world, he traveled and studied throughout Europe, developing an early fascination with ancient manuscripts and cultivating friendships with anyone and everyone worth knowing—and being known by. Spinning his own life into a legend, Petrarch became Europe’s first literary celebrity. Six feet tall, this towering figure felt so at home with the great men of classical times that he wrote (and published) letters to them.

  When he documented his ascent of Mount Ventoux, Petrarch gained acclaim as the father of Alpine climbing. With the help of his well-placed friends, he also climbed the steps of Rome’s Capitoline Hill in 1341 to accept a laurel wreath, the first bequeathed on a poet laureate since antiquity. In his acceptance speech, with characteristic immodesty, Petrarch declared that only emperors and poets were worthy of such an honor, a sentiment that seeded the apotheosis of the artist that would come in the Renaissance.

  I was so put off by Petrarch’s persona that I might never have read his poetry if not for Ferruccio, a mariner who captains and charters boats in Porto Ercole, a quaint port on the Tuscan peninsula called Argentario for its argento, or silver ore. That’s what the guidebooks say, but I prefer Ferruccio’s more poetic contention that the radiant sight of the full moon turning the sea to silver inspired the name.

  We’ve been sailing the Tyrrhenian Sea off the Argentario with Ferruccio for more than a decade. From him I learned that Italian has a specific word for a ship’s boy, mozzo (which is what Bob claims to be), and for the person who prepares food on board, cambuso (one of the roles of his co-captain, Erasmo). In sails to Italy’s enthralling islands—Sardinia, Elba, Ponza, and Capri among them—we’ve passed long golden summer days and silver moonlit nights talking of anything and everything, including Ferruccio’s favorite poet, Petrarch.

  “No one, Diana,” he insisted in his gravelly low voice, “was more romantic.” Well, yes. And no. On April 6, 1327, Petrarch beheld the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen in a church in Avignon. So smitten was he with the nineteen-year-old married beauty that he began to express in writing “the boundless love for which there was no cure.” His canzoniere, or songbook, with 366 sonnets and other verses—a leap year’s worth of tributes—all dedicated to the woman he called Laura, created the model for Italian love poetry.

  Yet physical love had almost nothing to do with it. “You can’t imagine what Laura’s leg looked like—or even her having legs,” Professor Giuseppe Patota, coauthor with Professor Valeria Della Valle of L’ italiano, a history of the language, points out. Petrarch and his long string of successors were more enamored with the language of love than love itself. He seemed rather relieved when Laura died, saying he no longer had to struggle with “an overwhelming but pure love affair.” Yet Petrarch continued to polish what he dismissively called his “little songs” for her throughout his life, transforming them into literary gems.

  Petrarch, a linguistic perfectionist, fashioned a new elevated language for poetry. Rather than grubby, sweat-stained syllables snatched from real life, he embroidered eloquent phrases in which water became “liquid
crystal” and his beloved (“the candid rose, thorn-encompassed”) an ethereal object of adoration, praised in lines such as these:

  He looks in vain for divine beauty

  who never saw of this fair one

  as she gently turns them;

  Nor does he know how Love heals and kills

  Who does not know how sweetly she sighs,

  And how sweetly talks, and sweetly laughs.

  (Kay, The Penguin Book of Italian Verse, p. 120)

  Although this may be too saccharine for modern tastes, Petrarch’s verses were hailed as “pure linguistic oxygen.” Migrating as quickly as quill could carry them, they made all of Europe, in a historian’s phrase, “sonnet-mad.” Eventually Petrarch’s rarified language inspired the Renaissance poets who created another Italian literary invention, the opera libretto (see chapter entitled “On Golden Wings,” page 164).

  I hold Petrarch at leastly partly responsible for the disconcerting gap between Italian’s written and spoken vocabularies. The popular Italian journalist and author Beppe Severgnini calls the overwrought language that Italians often write but rarely speak (except in public orations) l’italiano parallelo. As if hearing the voice of Petrarch in their ears, his countrymen use autoveicolo instead of macchina for “car,” precipitazione instead of pioggia for “rain,” and capo instead of testa for “head.”

  This practice mystifies foreigners like me, who must learn three different words for something as ordinary as a face: faccia, viso, and volto. It’s taken me years to realize they are not interchangeable: 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).