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

by Dianne Hales

  Another Cinquecento woman also exerted influence on book production and design. Isabella d’Este (1474–1539), “the first lady of the Renaissance,” attracted the greatest talents of a golden age to her court at Mantua. Besotted by books, she collected first editions and luxurious hand-illustrated books and commissioned the first print runs of Petrarch and other poets. At her insistence, the printer added something new—page numbers—to these volumes.

  Isabella’s “insistence” was famously formidable. When her husband, Francesco—described by contemporaries as “short, pop-eyed, snub-nosed, and exceptionally brave”—was imprisoned in Venice, Isabella’s grit, particularly in dealing with the ruthless Cesare Borgia, kept Mantua from being invaded. Upon his release, her less-than-grateful spouse declared himself “ashamed that it is our fate to have as wife a woman who is always ruled by her head.” Isabella stalked out but returned to rule Mantua for twenty years after Francesco died of syphilis, contracted from prostitutes, in 1519.

  Yet despite the obvious talents of Renaissance women, literary life remained very much an old boys’ club—nowhere more so than in Florence. In 1541 Duke Cosimo I, a distant cousin and successor of Lorenzo il Magnifico, conferred on the Florentine Academy “the authority, honor, and privilege for an official compilation of the rules of the Tuscan language.” Its distinguished but stodgy members pontificated about their vernacular in evermore-abstruse talks and treatises. Two quintessentially Italian passions saved the language from their deadly deliberations: language and food.

  I’ve spent enough time observing rowdy groups of bantering young men in Florence’s cafés, restaurants, and piazzas to imagine how their late-Renaissance counterparts came up with a tongue-in-cheek approach to the language question. At the time an unheralded but invaluable invention was transforming Italian agriculture: il frullone, a sievelike device that separated wheat from chaff to produce flour. In a land where pasta and pane (bread) had long sustained its people, the frullone was as important a breakthrough in its own way as the printing press.

  “Only pigs eat everything,” Florence’s intellectual young turks declared. Why not become human frulloni and separate the literary fior di farina—the flower (a pun in English, but not Italian, on “flour”) of the wheat—from the crusca (chaff or bran)? Meeting in a building that now houses an Irish pub, they proclaimed themselves the Brigata dei Crusconi (Brigade of Crusty Ones). The members playfully gave themselves names related to farming, cooking, baking, and bread, such as Lievito (yeast or leaven), Macinato (milled into flour), Sollo (soft or spongy), and Grattugiato (grated).

  Each Cruscone also selected a related symbol, such as a sieve or sheaf of wheat, which was embossed in vibrant colors upon a wooden pala, a shovel-like paddle bakers used to slide loaves of bread from an oven. Seated on ceremonial chairs constructed from wooden flour storage barrels, the crusty ones referred to their lighthearted meetings as cruscate, playful conversations of little import, like bread crusts.

  The Crusconi might have done nothing of substance if not for the arrival of an ambitious cervellone, or “big brain” (as the Italian linguistics professor Giuseppe Patota describes him to me) named Leonardo Salviati. L’Infarinato (covered in flour), his “Cruscan” name, had gained dubious repute for his work on the “rassettatura” or “reordering” of the Decameron—the literary equivalent of painting loincloths on Michelangelo’s nudes. Church censors had first taken a crack at expurgating Boccaccio in 1571, with disastrous results. Duke Cosimo I, with papal backing, brought in Salviati to reduce the damage. The new, less mutilated edition came out in 1582.

  A year later Salviati joined the Crusconi and reorganized them into L’Accademia della Crusca, today the oldest scholarly academy in Europe. His mission was to create something no one had ever before produced, the first great dictionary of officially recognized words in any European tongue. Some charged that Salviati sought mainly to curry favor with the pope, but his fellow word lovers took up the gauntlet and continued the project after his death in 1589.

  Theirs was no dry academic venture. French may have its “immortals” of the Académie Française, the superior souls who protect their proud linguistic heritage, but the Italian language police have always had much more fun. La Crusca’s voluminous archives teem with menus, skits, plays, puns, jokes, and rhapsodic odes to the academy and its members.

  Among La Crusca’s traditions was an annual stravizzo, a term members defined with understatement as “eating that happens together with pleasant conversation.” A modern dictionary may be more accurate when it defines the verb straviziare, derived from the word for “vice” (vizio), as “to indulge or be intemperate.” The menu from one stravizzo presents five staggering courses that included veal, tongue, prosciutto, pigeon, chicken, capon, lamb, meat rolls, soup, several varieties of pasta, artichokes, Parmigiano, strawberries, pears, peaches, biscotti—and stuzzicadenti (toothpicks). The goal the Crusconi gluttonously pursued was abbofarsi, or stuffing oneself to the bursting point.

  Despite their jocular tone and boisterous banquets, La Crusca’s founding brothers took their mission seriously. Over decades of research, discussion, and debate, they created the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca, published by a Venetian printer on January 20, 1612. The 960 oversize pages of the first such compendium in any language contained only words that qualified as “belle, significanti e dell’uso nostro” (“beautiful, noteworthy, and of our use,” that is, from Italian authors, mainly the three crowns—Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio—and other Florentines).

  Unlike previous dictionaries, the Vocabolario defined words rather than listing synonyms and traced their origins and history through prose and poetic citations, largely from the fourteenth-century masters of the language. Although critics sniped that the choices were too Tuscan and dated, the Vocabolario so impressed international scholars that France, England, and Germany set to work on similar compendiums. For Italians, La Crusca’s Vocabolario, like Dante’s Divina Commedia, became a gran libro della nazione, another literary substitute for a unified political state.

  La Crusca’s ongoing work to expand and embellish the language attracted the great thinkers of the times, including Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). Best known as the founder of modern science, this remarkably talented man of letters also wrote poetry and learned commentaries on Dante and Petrach. Although scholars of his day continued to write in Latin, Galileo deliberately chose the vivid, lucid Tuscan vernacular because of his commitment to spreading knowledge to all people.

  In one of his works, Galileo compares the universe to “un grandissimo libro” (“an enormous book”) that one can read and understand only if you know the language in which it was written: mathematics. “Even after four centuries,” the linguists Valeria della Valle and Giuseppe Patota note in L’italiano, their biography of the language, “neither his concepts nor his Tuscan way of writing seem distant from us.” Galileo muttered his most famous statement in Italian—“Eppur si muove” (“And yet it moves”)—under his breath when he was forced to refute his heretical assertion that the earth circled the sun.

  A lesser known but no less lively scientist, Francesco Redi (1626–1698), physician to the Medici grand dukes, brought a touch of scandal to the increasingly distinguished L’Accademia della Crusca. His most famous scientific contribution was his research disproving the theory of the spontaneous generation of maggots from rotting meat. In his experiments—among the first with modern scientific controls—Redi put a substance, such as chunks of dead fish or raw veal, into pairs of jars. He covered the tops of one group with fine gauze so only air could get in but left the other jars open. After several days, maggots appeared on the material in the open containers, but not on the gauze-covered ones, indicating that the vermin had developed from tiny eggs deposited by flies when they flew into the jars.

  Redi was less conscientious in his designated task of adding scientific terms to La Crusca’s Vocabolario. Many of the examples and citations he submitted
for new words, researchers discovered centuries after the fact, had come from his own work, not from the authors whose manuscripts he had claimed to possess. Perhaps his research in another area affected his thinking. Redi is best known for “Il Bacco in Toscana” (“Bacchus in Tuscany,” a poetic ode of praise for Tuscan wines and a diatribe against water:

  He who drinks water,

  I wish to observe,

  Gets nothing from me;

  He may eat it and starve.

  Whether it’s well, or whether it’s fountain,

  Or whether it comes foaming white from the mountain, I cannot admire it,

  Nor ever desire it…

  Wine, wine is your only drink!

  (www.elfinspell.com)

  As foreign powers seized control of Italy, La Crusca, dedicated to a language without a political state, closed down. An Italian most people think of as French eventually came to its rescue: Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), born of Italian parents in Corsica the year after France annexed it. The great military and political leader spoke French with an Italian accent throughout his life and never mastered its spelling. After defeating the Austrians at the Battle of Marengo in 1800, Napoleon appointed himself king of his linguistic homeland.

  In 1809, recognizing what the citizens of Florence would hold most dear, Napoleon conceded to them the right to use their language as well as French. He also established an annual prize for authors “whose works contribute with the greatest effect to the maintenance of the Italian language in all its purity.” In 1811 Napoleon reopened L’Accademia della Crusca and paid the salaries of its scholars. La Crusca flourished once more—until Mussolini’s propaganda machine took over the policing of the language. The scholars who had been working for decades on the fifth edition of the Vocabolario got only as far as “o.” The last word of this unfinished volume is ozono.

  La Crusca, which reopened in 1955, now maintains its sede, or central seat, in the austerely elegant Villa Medicea di Castello, a favorite residence of Lorenzo il Magnifico. Botticelli’s Primavera and Birth of Venus hung there in the sixteenth century. The surrounding gardens, planted in 1540, remain among the most renowned in Italy.

  In my pilgrimage through the Italian language, La Crusca was my mecca. I planned my first visit in 2005 months in advance. With my friend Stefania Scotti’s help, I composed an extremely courteous request for an interview with its president. “Chiarissimo Professor Sabatini,” she instructed me to write, using an honorific that literally means “most clear” but translates as “illustrious.” La Crusca’s press officer replied promptly to set a date and time.

  “La Crusca?” my Italian friends asked, stunned by my audacity at daring to enter the fortress of their language, a place in which most Italians would fear to open their mouths. I began to think they were right. I nervously prepared a list of questions in English (for my sake) and Italian (for the interview). I dressed in business black, wrapping myself in my magic shawl. My hands trembled as I reviewed my notes a final time. At the historic villa, I slipped on a small staircase, spiraling one of my high heels into the air. The shy young press officer gallantly replaced it on my foot.

  “I feel like Cinderella,” I said in English before remembering that I was standing (well, sitting at the moment) on Italian’s most hallowed ground. “La Cenerentola,” I translated, and he smiled.

  Stepping into the grand Sala delle Pale (the room of the baking shovels), I sensed the spirit of the boisterous founders of the crusty club. Like shields emblazoned with coats of arms, their brightly painted pale gleamed from the walls. I marveled at their ceremonial chairs and the cabinets, called sacchi, that contained official documents. A large oil painting immortalized Salviati, who inspired the literary irregulars, seated between two fetching beauties, one representing La Crusca and the other, the Florentine Academy of Art and Design.

  Even more impressive was the vaulted, hushed library, a veritable cathedral of books with more than 138,000 Italian volumes dating back to the 1500s. Here lies Italian’s genome, constructed of words chosen specifically and deliberately to please the ear, the eye, and the soul. They are, as La Crusca’s motto states, the language’s “loveliest blooms.”

  When I finally touched a first edition of the Vocabolario, I turned its stiff, dry pages with gentle reverence. No less than the artists laboring in a Renaissance bottega to fashion works of astounding beauty, I realized, the language “bakers” of La Crusca had painstakingly created a living masterpiece. And I finally grasped why their language has such special significance for Italians.

  Down through the centuries conquerors stole much of what Italians created. Emperors and kings routinely packed up paintings, sculptures, and jewels—a practice that continued into the twentieth century, when the Nazis filled railroad cars with pieces of Italian art. The one treasure no one could loot from Italians was their language, which La Crusca had elevated to a living art. Because of its efforts, the fourteenth-century dialect of Florence, with inevitable modifications in grammar and additions to the lexicon, lives in Italy’s classrooms, offices, shops, and restaurants.

  “If Dante appeared in this room today, you could talk with him,” La Crusca’s then-president, Francesco Sabatini, a tweedy, silver-haired scholar with an aquiline nose, assured me.

  “I can’t imagine what I would say,” I replied, intimidated just to be speaking to him.

  “But I can guess what he would say to you!” Professor Sabatini said in his deep God-the-Father voice. “Just imagine. More than seven hundred years after he lived, a woman comes from a continent he never knew existed, a woman with a nation and a language of her own who wants to learn about the language he spoke and wrote …”

  He paused to contemplate the significance of my odyssey and then leaned forward with an enormous smile and a twinkle in his dark eyes.

  “È un miracolo!”

  My love of Italian, a miracle? Could Dante himself have put it more poetically?

  “RUGGERO IS THE CONSUMMATE ITALIAN GENTLEMAN,” said the former professor’s colleagues in the Department of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, who urged me to visit the charming, sophisticated dantista (and ladies’ man). After retiring from the faculty, Ruggero Stefanini had returned to his hometown north of Florence to write poetry. Then he was diagnosed with advanced stomach cancer. “I get sometimes just a little weak,” he advised me by e-mail. “Come early.”

  When I arrived on a wintry March morning, Ruggero, pale and gaunt, was far frailer than his friends in America had suspected. He grimaced in pain as he shifted in his chair and rested one hand on the other to stop its trembling. I tried to cut the interview short, but he insisted on taking me to his favorite trattoria and ordering the local specialties for my lunch.

  Afterward we walked through the damp streets as he talked of “the language that was [his] life.” Of Dante: “As a writer I admire everything about him; as a man, almost nothing.” Of why he chose English for one of his poems: “I was very much in love with an American woman and Italian does not have a word for what I wanted to express: ‘togetherness.’” Of what Italian, more than any other language or literature, can teach: “how to live.”

  When we said goodbye, he gave me a book of his poetry inscribed with a phrase I couldn’t immediately decipher. On the bus ride back to Florence, I worked out the translation: “You are a breath of the spring I will not live to see.” Within a few weeks I learned of his death, and I realized that he had given me a lesson in how to die.

  Ruggero’s gallantry embodies a concept that defines the Italian character: fare bella figura. Foreigners mistakenly think they can translate this term into pat phrases such as “making a good impression” or “keeping up appearances.” Fare bella figura goes far beyond these superficialities to describe a refined code of behavior that Italians taught the world.

  Humanism, the intellectual movement that glorified man’s potential, arose in Italy, which became “the richest, most dazzling, cultured, i
rreverent, and intelligent nation of Christendom,” Luigi Barzini wrote in The Italians. “Italians had trans formed the universe, or, at least, man’s ideas about the universe and his place in it.” People no longer looked to the saints as role models. Instead they turned to the heirs of classical Rome and the inventors of the Renaissance to show them how to live in the manner to which they aspired.

  Then as now, the essence of italianità was language. “In our present times,” observed the Florentine playwright Giovan Battista Gelli in 1551, “many diverse people of intelligence and refinement, outside Italy no less than within Italy, devote much effort and study to learning and speaking our language for no reason but love.” These acolytes included Elizabeth I of England, Francis I of France, and Emperor Charles V, who once declared, “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.”

  John Milton and other British poets wrote sonnets in Italian. William Shakespeare based many of his plots on Italian novelle and set twelve of his forty plays in Italy. Italian artisans and artists, traveling to other countries, left behind words and phrases of their lyrical language along with the paintings, buildings, and sculptures that Mary McCarthy likened to “dropped handkerchiefs of marvelous workmanship.” Italian became the hallmark of a person of education, refinement, and sophistication—and a prerequisite for anyone aspiring to such status. “The Italians had all Europe for their pupils, both theoretically and practically in every noble bodily exercise and in the habits and manners of good society,” the nineteenth-century historian Jacob Burckhardt observed.

  Social graces remain woven into the fabric of Italian. Even the chipper Italian ciao, which does double duty as “hi” and “bye,” reflects centuries of bella figura, as I discovered on my first trip to the most serene city of Venice. A waiter at the café where I came every day to sip espresso and watch the pigeons swoop across the Piazza San Marco joked that my ciao sounded too Tuscan.