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

by Dianne Hales

  In 1498 Savonarola’s opponents, known as the Arrabbiati (the Angry Ones), dragged the mad-eyed monk, charged with heresy, from his cloister. As if a single death were not enough, the Florentines tortured him on the rack for three days (breaking almost every bone in his body, except the hand he needed to sign a confession), hanged him, and then cremated his body in a giant bonfire that burned for hours in the Piazza della Signoria—the same site where he had incinerated the works of others.

  Several years ago, during my Italian history studies in Florence, I walked past the plaque commemorating the last of Savonarola’s blazes on my way back from dinner at the Caffè Concerto Paszkowski, my favorite of the famed writers’ hangouts in the Piazza della Repubblica. On the chill, foggy evening, a young man standing nearby was playing a spirited violin concerto. The music echoed through the Piazzale degli Uffizi as I passed among Florence’s statuary tributes to Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and the other masters of Italian art and literature.

  All Italian cities have ghosts, but Florence’s seem to me to be always speaking. As I mulled over the words of its giants, I realized that I was unconsciously moving my hands beneath my cape in the very same ways that I do when I speak Italian. And I was speaking Italian—to myself! My teachers had predicted that someday this milestone of a moment would come, that I would start thinking, reacting, even dreaming in Italian. I didn’t believe them. Yet here, in the cradle of the language, in the shadow of Italy’s tre corone, I crossed some invisible membrane into a world that at once was entirely familiar yet completely new. Springing to life in my brain, Italian had traveled to my fingertips and set them a flight.

  HE’D LOST HIS NOSE. HIS EYES WERE MERE holes; his mouth, a rough slit. When workers paving a neighborhood in Rome around the turn of the sixteenth century dug up the battered ancient statue, they heaved him upright on a busy street corner near Piazza Navona. In celebration of the feast of San Marco on April 25, 1501, a cardinal draped a toga around the armless torso and attached Latin epigrams to its base. Jocular Romans followed suit, covering this unofficial community bulletin board with anonymous satiric jibes that lampooned church and state.

  The “talking statue” called Pasquino, Rome’s oldest social and political commentator, hasn’t been quiet since. Meno male (thank goodness)—for Italian’s sake. Clever pas quinades, copied on sheets of paper called cartelli and widely circulated, managed to keep all the world talking about Italians—and Italian—throughout the ill-fated Cinquecento. During the years we call the 1500s, warring princes, foreign invaders, and outbreaks of the plague all but destroyed the peninsula, its people, and their language. The ultimate horror came in 1527: the sack of Rome, an unparalleled orgy of lust, wanton destruction, and unspeakable cruelty by Spanish troops and German mercenaries. “In truth,” the Dutch humanist Erasmus wrote, “this was rather the fall of a world than of a city.”

  My friends Carla and Roberto Serafini introduced me to Pasquino, the stone survivor of the best and worst of Roman times, one night en route to their favorite pizzeria. But when Roberto commented that he was curious about what “il grillo parlante” was saying these days, I was confused.

  “The talking cricket?” I asked.

  Many Romans posting pasquinades, often in Romanesco dialect verse, assume this pen name, Roberto explained, describing it as a metaphor for someone piccolo ma spiritoso (small but witty). “Come te” (“Like you”), he teased. That night the musings attached to Pasquino’s statue dealt mainly with a proposal to extend equal political and legal rights to unmarried couples, including gays. The topic inspired all manner of puns and parodies, many so outrageously obscene that Roberto, ever the gentleman, refused to translate them.

  “They’re for Aretini,” he said, referring to the followers of the most famous and flamboyant of pasquinade authors, Pietro Aretino (1492–1556), whose name translates into Peter, citizen of Arezzo. This self-confessed scoundrel created the prototypes of today’s gossip columns and celebrity magazines.

  The illegitimate son of a cobbler liked to say he was born “with the spirit of a king.” Without family, fortune, or formal education, Aretino pioneered the use of language to garner attention, acclaim, and riches. After wandering through Tuscany and Umbria, he settled in Rome in 1517 and recruited the faceless Pasquino as the perfect foil for his talents. His acid pen, for hire by bankers, cardinals, aristocrats, and popes, honed the coarse pasquinade into a rapier-sharp weapon. When Hanno the elephant, pet of Pope Leo X, died in 1514, Aretino composed “The Last Will and Testament of the Elephant Hanno.” The fictitious document, which cleverly mocked Rome’s leading political and religious figures, kick-started his scandalous literary career.

  In another broadside, Aretino expressed no surprise that it was taking so long for the papal conclave of 1521–22 to choose a new pontiff. After all, he sniffed, one cardinal had a wife, another couldn’t keep his hands off boys, and the rest were heretics, thieves, traitors, counterfeiters, or spies. And, yes, Aretino named names—unless he was paid not to. He blatantly accused Cardinal Alessandro Farnese of having prostituted his sister to the Borgia Pope Alexander VI in order to obtain the regal crimson hat and robes of a “prince” of the church.

  At times Aretino pushed the limits too far. In the libidinous Sonetti lussuriosi (Lewd Sonnets), he wrote bawdy dialogue for an artist’s explicitly erotic engravings of copulating couples. The manuscript caused a sensation across Europe and provoked ecclesiastical ire. The church threw the artist in jail, and Aretino lost his papal patronage and protection. A would-be assassin, hired by a victim of his trenchant wit (or his cuckolding ways), knifed the pioneer pornographer and left him for dead on the banks of the Tiber.

  Aretino, who survived but lost two fingers in the attack, relocated to a more hospitable venue: Venice, which he fondly described as the “seat of all vices.” For almost thirty years, amid its labyrinthine streets and murky waters, Aretino indulged in every variety of lascivious activity, with a menagerie of mistresses, secretaries, boys, parasites, servants, and groupies. Despite—or perhaps because of—his outrageousness, he achieved an extraordinary position of international power and political influence. Emperor Charles V knighted him, and the pope bestowed ecclesiastical honors (although not the cardinal’s noble rank that he had dared hope for). Aretino became a brand name for everything from pieces of Murano glass to horses.

  “I live by the sweat of my ink pot,” the freewheeling freelancer declared, churning out verses, essays, and epic poems commissioned by vain nobles hungry for flattery and fame. The Duke of Gonzaga underwrote Aretino’s lavish lifestyle for years as he toiled away on a biographic ode. The leaders of France and Spain each hired him to spread scurrilous gossip about the other.

  Proclaiming himself “the secretary of the world,” Aretino possessed the raw talent to become one of the leading writers of his time, but lacked the discipline—and the desire. “I am a free man,” he wrote. “I do not need to copy Petrarch or Boccaccio. My own genius is enough. Let others worry themselves about style and so cease to be themselves. Without a master, without a model, without a guide, without artifice, I go to work and earn my living, my well-being, and my fame. What do I need most? With a good quill and a few sheets of paper, I mock the universe.”

  Aretino couldn’t resist mocking the Platonic humanists and their discourses on love and language. He set one of his parodies in a brothel, where an old prostitute expounds on the obscene activities of women in the three roles available to them in the Renaissance—wives, nuns, and whores. This unabashedly bawdy work, which would have made Boccaccio blush, became wildly popular throughout Europe and inspired an entire genre of ribald writing.

  Born centuries too soon to blog, the “scourge of princes,” as the Renaissance poet Ludovico Ariosto described him, produced a steady stream of letters oozing extravagant compliments and thinly disguised demands for hush money. He “kept all that was famous in Italy in a kind of state of siege,” wrote the nineteenth-century historian Jacob
Burckhardt, who condemned Aretino’s work as “beggary and vulgar extortion.” But even the celebrities he bedeviled couldn’t resist reading him. Aretino was the first European author to publish letters in a vernacular tongue—some three thousand of them, collected into six volumes, each an immediate success.

  The celebrated artists of the day were natural targets for Aretino’s attention. He spread malicious insinuations about why it took Leonardo several years to finish his signature portrait of the winsome La Gioconda, third wife of a much older and very rich husband, and slavishly begged Michelangelo for drawings since, as he wrote, “there are many kings but only one Michelangelo.” The artist declined Aretino’s unsolicited suggestions for his Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, but noted that the gossipmonger described doomsday as if he had already witnessed it. Some see Aretino’s features in Michelangelo’s apocalyptic painting on the face of St. Bartholomew, while the artist himself appears on the martyr’s flayed skin.

  The artist Titian painted Aretino three times. The most famous of these portraits hangs in Florence’s Pitti Palace. Everything about the huge figure is excessive: the massive belly, the shaggy long beard, the sumptuous velvet robes that envelop him. The French king gave Aretino the thick gold chain he wears, bearing a Latin motto that may be translated “His tongue will always speak falsehood.”

  Aretino died of a stroke at age sixty-four, but a widespread rumor claimed that the aging libertine’s last laugh killed him. Roaring over a juicy tale, he supposedly threw back his head and fatally knocked himself out. His exit was well timed. Three years later the Inquisition placed his complete works on its Index of Prohibited Books. His secretary Niccolò Franco, whose writings were even more defiant and decadent, suffered a crueler fate: the Inquisition sentenced him to death by hanging.

  Aretino represented a new literary and social phenomenon. With publishing flourishing, particularly in Venice, members of the “meritocracy”—called poligrafi for their multiple talents—could earn a living as writers, editors, translators, and anthologizers. Thanks to their efforts at standardizing the vernacular, by the end of the sixteenth century readers could no longer identify an Italian author’s home region by his language, and punctuation assumed a more or less modern form. The Cinquecento also saw the invention of the enthusiastic exclamation point, dubbed un punto affettuoso, an affectionate period, by an editor of the time.

  Throughout the peninsula, Latin and Italian remained uneasy bedfellows. Correspondents wrote letters in Italian but used Latin for headings, addresses, and dates. Lawyers questioned witnesses in Italian, but court records mixed Latin with the verbatim vernacular. Elementary and technical schools used Italian manuals, but universities remained fortresses of Latin, with no instruction in Italian. A new comic style called “macaronic” language, named for the rustic pasta, lampooned the “barbarous Latinity” of pompous pedants by presenting verses that looked like proper Latin but were chock-full of coarse expressions and vulgarities in Italian or dialect.

  As the Cinquecento unfolded, language became a much more serious matter. Lacking their own king, court, or constitution, Italian speakers placed supreme value on their imperiled tongue. “Living with the Spanish, turning in time with the Spanish [dancing to their tune, that is],” one writer wistfully observed, “have almost taken away my language.” Other Italians feigned indifference to their foreign rulers. As a dismissive saying in dialect put it, “France or Spain, as long as you eat.” But a consciousness of belonging to a common civilization began to bubble up like yeast, and with it a new awareness of Italian as the vehicle for a single national culture.

  Although Italian was clearly established as a literary language, Renaissance writers faced a dilemma as to which language to use on a daily basis. If they were Florentines, they could use the lively vernacular they spoke on the street. Or they could employ the more contrived and formal language of the aristocracy and courts. Or they could resurrect the classic fiorentino created by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio in the fourteenth century.

  A less practical option for non-Florentines was to write in their own dialect. The poet Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533) of Ferrara did so in creating the greatest chivalric epic of the Italian Renaissance, Orlando Furioso (Orlando Enraged). In this sprawling saga, set against the background of war between Charlemagne and invading Saracens, the hero goes mad with unrequited love for a pagan princess. Because so few people could read his own regional dialect, Ariosto decided to rewrite the entire saga in a more Tuscan Italian—a decision that turned his life into a love-mad drama.

  In Florence, Ariosto caught sight of a woman named Alessandra di Francesco Bettucci. So dazzled was he by her appearance that he noticed nothing else in the city. “I remembered little and little do I care,” he wrote in an impassioned letter. “I was left with just the immortal memory that in all that fair city I saw no fairer thing than you … [not] anyone who could equal you in beauty, in modesty, courtesy and noble semblance, much less surpass you.”

  Inconveniently, Alessandra was married at the time to the nobleman Tito di Leonardo Strozzi, a member of the court of Ferrara. Eventually Ariosto achieved a happy ending. His rewritten romance finally found widespread acclaim, and after her husband’s death, he married Alessandra in 1528.

  A more important but lesser known sostenitore (supporter) of Italian was an odd fellow named Pietro Bembo (1470–1547)—known today mainly for the typeface named for him—the well-educated son of a Venetian nobleman. This humanist scholar was utterly smitten by Petrarch and his elevated way of writing. At the turn of the sixteenth century Bembo created a petrarchino, the first of the little books clutched by so many lords and ladies in Renaissance portraits. (One writer described them as “the prayer books of a lay culture.”) Bembo’s original pocket book reproduced in type Petrarch’s final handwritten copy of his Italian works, a priceless manuscript, now in the Vatican Library, that was Bembo’s most cherished possession.

  I began to understand Bembo, who loved falling helplessly, hopelessly, deliriously in love, after Bob and I visited the charming town of Asolo, in the Veneto, where Bembo spent part of his career. On our first visit, when Bob disappeared in search of parking, I informed the concierge at the Hotel Villa Cipriano that I had lost my husband. “Don’t worry, signora,” he beamed. “We will find you another.”

  Bembo was an early master of such swift substitutions. Enamored of a Venetian girl, Bembo tenderly recounted every spasimo of longing and frustration in letters to his admiring friends. In time he became attracted to Lucrezia Borgia, the pampered daughter of the decadent Borgia pope Alexander VI and wife of the Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso d’Este. A visit from her when he was sick with fever inspired Bembo to write steamy verses crammed with literary allusions to every pair of lovers who ever lived in print—Aeneas and Dido, Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere. Yet Bembo, wary of the watchful and jealous men in Lucrezia’s life, restricted his passion to pen and paper.

  Bembo’s letters, which one critic describes as “informed, mannered, obscure, and so loaded with spiritual effusions on love, beauty, God and women that they are almost unreadable,” brought him to the attention of the widow of the king of Cyprus, who presided over a “musical comedy court,” as it is often described, both charming and zany, in Asolo. He became a long-term fixture and glorified the townspeople in his best-known work Gli Asolani, which earned him a critic’s coronation as “the archpriest of love.”

  Bembo had a real knack for getting himself into—and out of—delicate situations. At the court of the bookish Elisabetta Gonzaga in Urbino, he enjoyed declaiming on love costumed as an ambassador of Venus, the love goddess. When he won a legitimate diplomatic post as ambassador of Venice to Florence, he became a cavaliere servente (a kind of Renaissance “walker,” a man who escorts married ladies) and flagrantly courted the alabaster-skinned Ginevra de’ Benci, the subject of a famous portrait by Leonardo now in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. Eventually securing a post as papal s
ecretary, Bembo settled in Rome, found a new illicit love, and fathered three children. Despite his illegitimate brood, Bembo earned a cardinal’s princely robes.

  The real love of Bembo’s life, however, was the Italian language. On a boyhood trip to Florence, he became infatuated with the Tuscan way of talking, which he affected as an adult. To preserve and exalt his adopted vernacular—although some say it was mainly to impress a mistress—Bembo created the first rules of grammar for writing in Italian. Linguists consider his Prose della volgar lingua (Writings of the Vulgar Tongue), published in 1525, a watershed in the history of the Italian language.

  Every literary author, Bembo argued, should write for posterity and should therefore choose the best available language. Just as Petrarch had used Latin and Greek classics as his models, Bembo sought to “purify the language of the tribe” by using Italians most edifying models—Boccaccio for prose and Petrarch for poetry—without any contamination from Latin or dialect. Disdainful of Dante’s “rough and dishonoured words,” Bembo endorsed the use of only the more refined terms in the Paradiso.

  Bembo influenced several women Renaissance poets, including Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547), whose Rime della Divina Vittoria Colonna was the first published book of Italian poetry by a woman. Virtually unknown outside of Italy today, Vittoria Colonna was as great a celebrity as Michelangelo (her devoted admirer) in their day—recognized, gossiped about, petitioned, pandered to, plotted against. Born into one of Rome’s oldest and most powerful noble clans, the marchesa lived at the political, intellectual, and artistic epicenter of the times. Aretino, of course, bombarded her with sycophantic missives.