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

by Dianne Hales

  They did the same when I used the lofty ventre (abdomen) rather than the everyday pancia (belly) when commenting about teenagers in jeans cut so low that their tummies stick out. “Don’t feel bad,” a friend said. “My grandmother still complains of an aching estremità rather than piede” (“extremity” rather than “foot”). She might have been a woman after Petrarch’s own heart.

  But even greater than his love of fancy and fanciful words was Petrarch’s passion for the ancient manuscripts that were being extricated from crumbling Roman ruins and medieval monasteries. By translating and contemplating Cicero and other Latin writers, Petrarch shifted the way people thought about life itself. Rather than the medieval view of existence as a mere way station to eternity, he espoused a fuller appreciation of the dignity and potential of human life, the fundamental principle of humanism. As his reputation grew, Petrarch dedicated himself to classical studies and settled into a scholarly life. When he died working on his books, he left money for impoverished Boccaccio to buy himself a warm winter dressing gown.

  Petrarch’s resuscitation of classical ideals triggered an infatuation with all things ancient that had an unanticipated linguistic consequence: Latin made a surprising comeback. Once again intellectuals exalted the superiority of the classic language, and once again the vernacular fell victim to snobbish discrimination.

  When I first read critical attacks on my adopted language, I took them personally. How dare the acid-tongued, sour-spirited Latinophile Lorenzo Valla, who despised almost everything and everyone, say that Italian was a purely functional instrument of communication, lacking in rules and standardization and unworthy of literary pretensions? I couldn’t even comprehend the asinine assertion of one of his contemporaries that Dante was “un ignorante,” who used Italian—or his own version of it—because he hadn’t mastered Latin.

  In time, I am glad to report, the purists did themselves in. Determined to purge medieval variations from classical Latin, they concocted an even more contrived language that only the most cultivated of their effete circle could comprehend (or at least pretend to do so). Latin remained the exclusive domain of the rich and privileged, but the vernacular kept gaining ground—if only to clear up confusion. One duke mandated its use in all official correspondence after a cleric, not the falcon he’d ordered, showed up at his door in response to a request written in Latin.

  Ferruccio, the Petrarch-loving sailor, also helped me understand the ancient hold of dialects. Centuries ago the Sienese claimed and colonized the craggy island of Giglio, just off the Argentario, which subsequently fell to various Italian and foreign rulers. As a boy, Ferruccio spent his summers with his grandparents, who lived on the island and spoke its dialect. When he went to university in Siena, he startled his local classmates with his intimate knowledge of what they considered their hometown tongue. In other parts of Italy, a female sibling might be a sorella, suora, suore, sorore, serocchia, sirocchia, or sorocchia, they thought, but only in Siena is she a suoro—and, it turns out, on Giglio.

  The fate of the literary dialect called italiano, toscano, or fiorentino hinged on the fortunes of Florence, which was entering its Camelot years. As the financial capital of the world, Florence had become the richest city in Europe, with a gross national product that surpassed that of England under the great Elizabeth I. Its family-owned banks, which invented checks, letters of credit, and treasury notes, financed (at profitable interest rates) the multimillion-florin ventures of Europe’s kings.

  The most successful of these dynasties were the Medici. Called God’s bankers because they collected money from every country in Europe on behalf of the church, they ruled fifteenth-century Florence with the power, but not the title, of princes. The Medici effect, as generous support for creative ventures has come to be known, drew the best and the brightest in every artistic and intellectual field to Florence. The humanistic ideals of their Platonic Academy sparked the great flowering of achievement known as the Renaissance. However, the language that gave it its name (rinascita, or “rebirth”) and became its lifeblood was Italian.

  The new “vernacular humanists,” with melodious names such as Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, were cultured, courtly, elegant—and so good-looking that even the driest commentators could not resist a mention of Ficino’s pleasing face or Mirandola’s golden hair. These glorifiers of man’s every dimension were also downright sexy. After all, as J. H. Plumb comments in The Italian Renaissance, sex is “par excellence the expression of the individual man.”

  The Greeks and Romans had known this all along. Their gods were unabashedly lusty; their poetry, explicitly erotic. It was not that the vernacular humanists advocated decadence (that would come in the 1500s with Pietro Aretino and his flagrantly erotic writing), but that they recognized and embraced sexuality as central to human experience.

  Too central in some cases. A portrait in the Uffizi of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) sparked my curiosity about the blond youth reputed to be the best-looking man in Renaissance Florence. This brilliant philosopher was also one of the smartest, called the phoenix of geniuses because he knew something of everything, gifted with a memory so nimble that he could recite entire books backward (and I assume forward). At age twenty-three, Pico, as he was called, developed nine hundred theses on religion, philosophy, magic, and other intellectual pursuits, which he offered to debate against all comers in Rome.

  On the way to this intellectual showdown, Pico stopped in Arezzo and became embroiled in a love affair with the wife of one of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s cousins, which turned out badly for everyone, especially him. Attempting to run off with the woman, he was caught, wounded, and imprisoned by her husband. He was released only upon the intervention of Lorenzo himself. Pico’s most famous Italian writings were his love poems, but his more esoteric Latin musings on Plato and classic philosophy brought him under suspicion of heresy, a serious crime. Fleeing to France, he was arrested and imprisoned, once again to be released into Lorenzo’s custody in Florence.

  Pico might have done well to follow the example of another handsome humanist, the Renaissance marvel Leon Battista Alberti, architect, mathematician, painter, poet, art critic, and writer. Alberti contributed an invaluable work to his beloved vernacular. In order to lift his language up to the stature of Latin and Greek, he spelled out rules and regulations in the first grammar for Italian—for any European language, in fact.

  Convinced that Italian was capable of expressing the noblest concepts, if properly cultivated, Alberti organized a certame coronario (contest for the crown). On October 22, 1441, eight competitors read poems in Italian on the subject of true friendship. When the conservative, Latin-leaning judges decided that no one merited the silver laurels, Alberti protested vehemently—and proved his point by writing his most famous work, I libri della famiglia (translated as The Family in Renaissance Florence), a treatise on the fundamental Italian institution, in Italian.

  In its pages, the sensible and sensitive author offers sage advice to gentlemen: “Let a man take a wife for two reasons: the first is to perpetuate himself with children, and the second is to have a steady and constant companion for his entire life. Therefore, you must look to have a woman capable of bearing children and pleasing enough to serve as your perpetual companion.”

  He even ventures, despite some embarrassment, to offer recommendations on the actual engendering of children. Above all, “husbands should not couple with their wives in an agitated state of mind or when they are perturbed by fears or other like preoccupations, for such emotions … disturb and affect those vital seeds which then must produce the human image.” Another recommendation for a man: “Make yourself intensely desired by the woman.”

  The polymath Alberti was immediately intrigued by a newfangled German invention, the printing press, which made its way to Italy around 1460. “With these twenty-six soldiers,” its inventor Johannes Gutenberg had declared, referring to the metal type of the alphabet, “I will conquer the
world.” His “troops” carried Italian to an ever-growing audience throughout the peninsula and the continent.

  In printing centers such as Venice, a new breed of experts emerged—specialists who corrected manuscripts so they were clear, coherent, and intelligible. Under the surveillance of these editors, Italian acquired the formal characteristics of a written language, including more consistent spelling. However, punctuation remained, as the linguist Bruno Migliorini, who wrote the first history of the Italian language in 1960, put it, “scarce and oscillating,” with some writers using none at all and others arbitrarily inserting a “full stop,” comma, or colon wherever they chose.

  Yet even as it replaced Latin in public and private documents, Italian still lacked the prestige that only the imprimatur of the highest power in the land could confer. This was the gift of Italian’s glorious white knight, Lorenzo de’ Medici, the most remarkable public figure of his time. I think of him as Italian’s Principe Azzuro, or Prince Charming. A statesman and scholar, he underwrote the first printing press in Florence, contributed lavishly to the University of Florence, and purchased books and rare manuscripts for the ever-expanding Medici library.

  The single word most identified with the Medici is palle or “balls,” the family symbol, which by various accounts represent pills (the word medici means “doctors”), pawnbrokers’ chits, or Byzantine coins, which appear on the arms of the guild of money changers to which the family belonged. In times of danger, the Medici rallied their supporters with cries of “Palle! Palle! Palle!”

  Lorenzo, the most charismatic Medici, charmed men, women, and the masses despite his coarse features and enormous nose. At age sixteen, he fell in love with Lucrezia Donati, a girl of “rare beauty, great honesty and truly noble birth,” wrote his first biographer. In her praise, Lorenzo wrote “extremely elegant verses and rhymes in the Tuscan dialect.” Though he may have worshipped this fair maiden in words, he certainly didn’t keep his distance from other women. Niccolò Machiavelli, the family’s historian, referred to Lorenzo as “amazingly involved in sensual affairs.” Another Florentine historian, Francesco Guicciardini, described him as “licentious and very amorous.”

  As Lorenzo pursued love and lovers, his mother, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, a minor poet herself, set about the business of finding him a wife. As the spouse of the sickly Piero the Gouty, she made good health and breeding potential the prime criteria. Clarice Orsini, a Roman princess, was not only healthy but wealthy—and noble, a nice touch for a family that lived like royalty in all but name.

  To celebrate his betrothal, Lorenzo arranged a jousting tournament, the first ever in the Florentine republic. The very concept seemed so alien that Machiavelli felt it necessary to volunteer a definition: “a scuffle of men on horseback.” Critics sniped that the Medici heir was not only marrying a foreign noble but taking on princely affectations.

  Lorenzo, riding a white charger, appeared in a white silk mantle bordered in scarlet and a black velvet cap encrusted with rubies and a large diamond. By special privilege, he carried the French fleur-de-lis on his shield and the red Medici palle on his banner (along with his married mistress’s scarf). The superb young athlete unhorsed every opponent. Lorenzo won not just the day but also the hearts of his countrymen, who cheered even louder at his extravagant wedding festivities, which, as Machiavelli put it, “were held with the pomp of apparel and all other manner of magnificence befitting such a man.” Although Magnifico was a title given to every lord in those days, Lorenzo became the most Magnifico of all.

  This magnificence rubbed off on Italian. The superbly educated Lorenzo, who succeeded his father at age twenty, could read and write the ancient languages well. However, he chose to speak only in the simple, beautiful tongue he had learned as a child, and allowed only Italian at his table, where members of his illustrious Platonic Academy, along with the young Michelangelo and other artists, joined in the conversation.

  “At Lorenzo’s court,” note Indro Montanelli and Roberto Gervaso in Italy in the Golden Centuries, “the language received those finishing touches that made it the richest, most refined, and sweetest of tongues, not only in all of Italy, but—in those days—in the whole world.”

  Lorenzo and his humanist tutor Poliziano produced two anthologies that served as manifestos for the Tuscan vernacular. In the first, the Raccolta aragonese (Aragon Collection), a gift to the Aragonese royal family, Lorenzo compiled verses by Tuscan authors from Dante to himself. His dedication praised the local volgare as the most advanced dialect on the peninsula because of the two centuries of illustrious poets who had used it.

  In the Comento de miei sonetti (Comments on My Sonnets) Lorenzo contended that the vernacular is as good as Latin—if not better—for writing “high” literature. He defended this rather daring declaration (in the heydey of humanism) that an everyday language, spoken by the uneducated masses, can deal with noble subjects by citing the richness (he uses the allusive word copia, which translates as “abundance”) that shines through in the works of le tre corone, as well as the earlier Tuscan dolce stil nuovo poets such as Guido Cavalcanti, the man Dante called his “first friend.” Just as the “Florentine empire” dominated the peninsula, Lorenzo concluded, so should its language.

  Florence became a literary laboratory where writers experimented with all sorts of genres. Lorenzo himself composed love poems, lusty ballads, and canti carnascialeschi (festive songs), some of which the censors of the Inquisition would later decry as scandalously obscene. His compositions extolled the delights of youth, women, falconry, the tranquil Tuscan countryside, and its rustic inhabitants.

  “Who happy would be, let him be,” Lorenzo wrote in his most famous verse. “Of tomorrow who can say?” (“Chi vuol esser lieto sia, del doman non v’è certezza.”) In this seize-the-day spirit, the patrician poet entertained the city with masquerades, revels, pageants, and processions. Lorenzo elevated carnascialismo, carnival merriment, almost to the point of art. “If ever history could be happy, it was then,” wrote one commentator.

  History turned dark on April 26, 1478, the bleakest day of Lorenzo’s rule. The Pazzi, a rival family working in collaboration with the pope, had masterminded a daring plot. At the elevation of the Communion host during Easter Mass, as the congregation in Florence’s Duomo devoutly bowed their heads, the conspirators stabbed Lorenzo and his younger brother Giuliano, who died immediately. Poliziano and other friends pulled Lorenzo, only slightly grazed, into the vestry and barred the door. The Pazzi expected the Florentines to rally to their rebellious cause. Instead the crowds shouted “Palle! Palle!” for the Medici.

  Lorenzo’s vengeance was swift and merciless. The two leaders of the coup, including an archbishop, were hanged. (The young Leonardo sketched their dangling bodies.) Dozens of conspirators were dragged naked through the streets before being executed. The head of the Pazzi family was killed, thrust into a hole, dug up again, and then dumped in the Arno.

  According to the custom of time, Botticelli painted the Pazzi conspirators with ropes around their necks on the walls of the Bargello. Lorenzo, who composed rhyming epitaphs placed below each portrait, exterminated the family name, forbidding anyone even to pronounce it. The Pazzi coat of arms was erased in perpetuity, their property confiscated. In contemporary Italian, perhaps not solely by linguistic coincidence, pazzi refers to people who behave insanely.

  The attempted coup and its many ramifications challenged Lorenzo’s leadership. The Medici’s vast financial enterprises foundered as a result of mismanagement and bad loans. In his early forties, Lorenzo began to suffer complications of gout, the disease that had killed his father. A slow fever, probably caused by spreading infection, attacked, as Poliziano recorded, “not only the arteries and veins, but the limbs, intestines, nerves, bone, and marrow.” Doctors brewed what they hoped would be a cure: a concoction of pulverized pearls and other precious stones that may well have hastened his death in 1492 at age forty-three.

  Two years later, Lorenzo’
s son Piero, lacking his father’s charisma and political acumen, fled the city. That year, at the urging of the conniving lord of Milan, the French invaded the peninsula and marched into Florence. But when the French king Charles VIII demanded an extortionary sum, the Florentines refused to pay the full amount. When he threatened to sound his trumpets to call his troops to arms, a magistrate shouted the phrase that became a local proverb: “Se suonerete le vostre trombe, noi suoneremo le nostre campane!” (“If you sound your trumpets, we will ring our bells!”)

  Soon hatred for the occupying foreigners brought together an unprecedented coalition of city-states, duchies, and papal forces in the peninsula. Troops speaking a dozen dialects rallied for “the liberty of Italy”—as if “Italy” really existed. The Military and Sovereign Order of the Knights of Saint John more precisely declared that they were fighting for “the Italian language.” The decisive battle, at Fornovo on July 6, 1495, marked a catastrophic turning point for Italy. Two-thirds of the soldiers who died that bloody day were Italian; the French escaped. This rout set the stage for nearly four hundred yeas of foreign occupation.

  In the dark days that followed, Florence fell under the sway of the fanatic friar Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498), who wielded words like a whip. Claiming that he personally conversed with God, Savonarola stirred his followers (derided as piagnoni, or snivelers and whiners, by his critics) into a frenzy with his fiery sermons. They would stream into the streets singing songs with lyrics such as “crazy, crazy for Jesus.” In the infamous Bonfire of the Vanities, the snivelers rounded up and burned books, sumptuous clothing, fine furniture, jewelry, gaming tables, musical instruments, poetry, mirrors, makeup, and works of art (including paintings by Botticelli, thrown on the pyre by his own hand).