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

by Dianne Hales

  Coaching me in the Venetian pronunciation, he explained that the word itself was a local invention. In La Serenissima’s glittering heyday, correspondents signed letters, “Il Suo schiavo” (“your slave”). Meeting on the street, acquaintances would bow and repeat the same ingratiating words. However, in the Venetian dialect, which softens the hard sound of sch (pronounced sk in other regions) to a chewy sh (as in “show”), Suo schiavo came out sciao, which melted into ciao as it migrated to other parts of Italy.

  When I traveled to the south, I discovered that the mellifluous Neapolitans, who can make a menu sound like music, were even more effusive. “I am the last button on the livery of your least lackey,” an unctuous marchese would intone when he took his leave. The proper response: “The last button on the livery of my least lackey is a diamond.”

  Italian Renaissance authors taught the world how to act with the same flourishes of grace and style—and, when need be, cunning. The most widely read books in sixteenth-century Europe were what we would call self-help manuals. Niccolò Machiavelli’s Il Principe (The Prince) served as a primer for those hungry for power and a survival manual for those trying to hold on to it. Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier) instructed gentlemen and their ladies in the ways of talking, acting, and interacting that would enhance their social status. Giovanni della Casa’s Il Galateo, the first etiquette book for the masses, taught the burgeoning middle and merchant classes that good manners could serve them as well as—if not better than—mere money. So influential did these three works become that Emperor Charles V of Spain kept Machiavelli’s Prince and Castiglione’s Courtier next to the Bible at his bedside, and the word galateo, with a small g, remains synonymous in Italy with etiquette.

  I wish that all three were required reading today. “Do you realize that we would never have ended up in Iraq if George Bush had read Machiavelli?” I said to my somewhat startled husband a few years ago. In The Prince, Machiavelli (1469–1527) clearly spells out that if a ruler is thinking of invading a foreign state, he had better be prepared to send in an ample army, take up residence there himself, or set up a well-armed permanent colony to keep the natives in check.

  The names of few authors have penetrated the global vocabulary as profoundly as Machiavelli, an international byword for political cunning and pragmatism; yet no one, as T. S. Eliot observed, “was ever less Machiavellian than Machiavelli.” As a civil servant in the Florentine republic, which held power for fourteen years after Savonarola’s overthrow in 1498, Machiavelli served in various diplomatic and administrative roles, including minister of defense, which gave him firsthand experience with power. When the Medici returned in 1512, their supporters accused Machiavelli of conspiracy and tried, tortured, and exiled the republican patriot.

  Frustrated in his forced retirement to his modest country home, Machiavelli began work on Il Principe. At the time the Medici pope Leo X, son of Lorenzo il Magnifico, and his brother Giuliano seemed likely to form an Italian alliance, perhaps even a nation-state. As Machiavelli saw it, a Medici pope (or prince) who heeded his advice could bring a better future to Italy and perhaps even take up arms to liberate the peninsula from its “barbarian” invaders—a vision of unification almost 350 years before the fact. More pragmatically Machiavelli hoped that a clear-eyed, no-nonsense tactical handbook would serve as a job application, a display of his political acumen that could gain him a position in the Medici government.

  Machiavelli’s dreams, personal and political, never materialized. He died—“of a surfeit of failure,” one historian stated—before the printing of his masterwork. But by analyzing affairs of state dispassionately, with logic and objectivity, Machiavelli did more than create a classic. As professors like to quip, he put the science into political science. He thought that it should be possible to devise general rules about politics because the same desires and fears motivate all people in all places. Machiavelli, as Francis Bacon observed, teaches “what men do, not what they ought to do.”

  Five centuries after Machiavelli’s time, The Prince still compels and shocks readers for two reasons: what its author said and how he said it. “A prince must, if he wants to keep power, learn to be able not to be good and use or not use this ability according to need,” Machiavelli argued. Conventional virtues, such as generosity, kindness, and keeping one’s word, might undermine his power, whereas qualities that appear to be vices could be essential to his survival.

  What if a ruthless prince lost the adulation of his people? Better to be feared than loved, shrugged Machiavelli, who observed that since men are generally ungrateful, vacillating, cowardly, and greedy, they might promise their souls to a prince yet desert or betray him because love is fickle, whereas fear is not. Machiavelli never agonized over whether the ultimate end might justify any means. He was sure it would.

  As a case in point Machiavelli cited the ruthless Cesare Borgia, called Il Valentino from his title as Duke of Valentinois. When his father, decadent and opportunistic, assumed the papacy as Alexander VI, the two conspired to take over much of central Italy. Machiavelli coolly describes how Borgia, to subdue unruly Romagna, “full of thefts, fights, and of every other kind of insolence,” hired a “cruel and able” henchman and gave him full authority to do whatever was necessary to impose order.

  Once the province was pacified, Borgia wanted to show the resentful populace that “if any form of cruelty had arisen, it did not originate from him but from the harsh nature of his minister.” So one morning the local citizens awoke to discover their hated overlord “placed on the piazza in two pieces with a block of wood and a bloody sword beside him.” Borgia had deftly accomplished his objective. “The ferocity of such a spectacle,” Machiavelli wrote, “left these people satisfied and amazed at the same time.” The Borgias’ ambitious scheme unraveled when Alexander VI suddenly sickened—perhaps the result of poison—and died. Cesare, having lost everything and everyone, ended up a babbling madman and died in his early thirties.

  Just as remarkable as The Princes unflinching pragmatism is its language. Considered by some the finest Italian stylist of the Cinquecento, Machiavelli wrote in a clean, stiletto-sharp vernacular that echoed the everyday speech of his fellow Florentines (including, in some of his more ribald works, their earthiness). So proud was he of his local tongue that, in one of his lesser-known essays, Machiavelli resurrected Dante. In a richly imagined debate, the poet conceded that the language of La Divina Commedia is actually Florentine. Why call it anything else, Machiavelli asked, if it has simply absorbed a few non-Florentine words from other sources?

  In his finest Florentine, Machiavelli, who, as one biographer put it, “felt the shame of Italy like a wound,” mourned most eloquently for his fatherland—“leaderless, lawless, beaten, despoiled, torn apart, overrun, and subjected to every manner of desolation”—and yearned for a chance to make and not just write its history. When the Florentine republic returned to power in 1527, Machiavelli applied for his old post but was rejected.

  Shortly before his death that same year, the heartbroken political strategist wrote to a friend, “I love my country better than my very soul.” His country, which ignored him in life, didn’t know quite what to say of him in death. His appropriately monumental tomb in Santa Croce, the burial site for Italy’s titans of history, reads simply, “To so great a name, no epitaph can do justice.”

  Machiavelli, whose satiric play The Mandrake is still revived and performed around the world, couldn’t resist mocking the pretensions of some of his newly prosperous countrymen. In his own twist on bella and brutta figura, he recounted the story of a character named Castruccio. A man from Lucca invites him to dinner at his house, which—thanks to a recent windfall—he has just remodeled in the most ostentatious manner possible. During the meal Castruccio suddenly spits in his host’s face. Rather than apologize, he explains that he did not know where else to spit without damaging something valuable.

  I can picture Machiavel
li’s smirking expression as he told this tale. In his portraits, you can spot tiny cynical creases hovering at the edge of his mouth, a counterpoint to the crafty gleam in his eyes. My hunch is that his sardonic demeanor played some role in his undoing. Surely the impeccable Castiglione, every inch the perfect courtier he portrayed in Il libro del cortigiano, would never have indulged in such dangerous self-revelation.

  If princes lived by the sword, courtiers survived by the word. Unlike medieval knights who proved themselves on battlefields, the men and women of Renaissance courts had to maneuver through the more treacherous turf of palace intrigues and power plays. Count Baldassarre Castiglione (1478–1529), named for one of the magi, or wise men, never lost his footing.

  Castiglione lived the way Petrarch and his admirer Bembo wrote: on a loftier plane, above the messy banalities of ordinary life. In 1504, after serving the Duke of Mantua, Castiglione moved to the place he called “the very abode of joyfulness,” the court of Urbino, home of the artists Raphael and Bramante and one of the most civilized places in the Renaissance world.

  Its Duke Federigo da Montefeltro, most famous for the portrait in the Uffizi of his hatchet-nosed profile, epitomized an ideal Renaissance ruler—scholar, warrior, and patron of the arts. His invalid wife, Duchess Elisabetta Gonzaga, became Castiglione’s idolized, idealized platonic inspiration. He hid her portrait and the verses she inspired behind a mirror in his room. “Never be it spoken without tears,” he wrote years later, finally expressing his true sentiments, “the Duchess, too, is dead!” (William Butler Yeats, equally romantic, claimed, “[This phrase] often moved me till my eyes dimmed.”)

  Castiglione won me over with a single word he created to describe the essence of courtly behavior: sprezzatura, the studied carelessness that “conceals art and presents everything said and done as something brought about without laboriousness and almost without giving it any thought.” The closest English comes is “nonchalance,” which fails to capture the behind-the-scenes preparation and hard work that underlies the ability to carry off “things that are exquisite and well done”—be it a duel, debate, or dance, executed with such ease that it inspires “the greatest wonder.” This is the essence of bella figura: “acting” the gentleman, playing a role in the world’s eyes, prizing appearance over reality.

  In a series of dialogues and discussions, based on his own experiences and observations, Castiglione fleshes out his ideal gentleman as if he were painting a portrait. He must be a manly man, physically accomplished, proficient in arms and horsemanship, courageous in battle, but above all a man with grazia, or gracefulness, in all he does. Yet Castiglione doesn’t advise courtiers to be insincere or opportunistic solely out of self-interest. By making the best possible impression, he emphasizes, they are more likely to succeed and become effective advisors to their princes.

  Although a courtier requires a superb education in letters, music, and the fine arts, Castiglione cautions against an excess of excellence so as not to provoke jealousy. With Machiavellian shrewdness, he advises a courtier to be bold in battle—but only under his lord’s eyes, so he gets proper recognition for his bravery. Above all, he exhorts gentlemen to speak well, avoiding any affectation in language, and to entertain others with witty remarks, urbane stories, and clever jests.

  A lady of the court, Castiglione notes, must guard her virtue and reputation, avoid unsuitable activities (such as sports), and cultivate a sweetness and gentleness that “shall always make her appear the woman without any resemblance to a man.” Castiglione didn’t mince words: looks matter. “That woman lacks much who lacks beauty,” he comments. But any woman could learn to be charming and delightful in conversation, vivacious, warm, affable, “far from prudish but never bawdy nor lascivious.”

  At age thirty-eight Castiglione found all these comely qualities in Ippolita Torelli, a pretty fifteen-year-old noblewoman, whom he married. His adored wife bore him three children before dying four years later. Overwhelmed by grief, Castiglione renounced courtly life and entered the priesthood. Pope Clement VII sent the silver-tongued sophisticate as his ambassador to the Spanish court of Emperor Charles V in 1524.

  Three years later the emperor’s mercenaries invaded and pillaged Rome. Cornered in the Castel Sant’ Angelo, the pope raged against Castiglione, accused him of a “special friendship” with the emperor, and blamed him for not averting the catastrophe. Charles V’s court rationalized Rome’s misfortunes as divine retribution for the many sins of its clerics. Caught in the middle, Castiglione fell into a debilitating depression. Through eloquent letters, he eventually regained the favor of both pope and emperor, but his spirit was broken.

  Although he shared his manuscript with respected friends, Castiglione might never have allowed publication of The Book of the Courtier in 1528 if the poet Vittoria Colonna hadn’t circulated it widely, despite his request that she not. The marchesa brushed off his protests with coy compliments. “I do not wonder that you have formed a perfect courtier,” she cooed, “since you had only to hold a mirror to yourself and reflect what you saw there.”

  In 1529, exhausted and demoralized, the “ornament of every court” died in the Spanish city of Toledo, where he was buried in its opulent cathedral, then the most sumptuous church in Christendom, with utmost pomp. “One of the best gentlemen in the world is dead,” Charles V remarked to his courtiers. Eventually Castiglione’s family brought his remains back to Italy to lie next to his wife’s in the family chapel in Mantua.

  Castiglione’s bible of refined behavior took on a life of its own. The book was soon translated into Spanish, German, French, and English, and 108 editions were published between 1528 and 1616. (Of course, Pietro Aretino created a smutty parody, La cortigiana.) Castiglione’s readers devoured his book so compulsively that, to the pope’s alarm, a gentlewoman in Urbino reportedly became so rapt in reading and rereading The Book of the Courtier that she died without receiving the last rites. Yeats poetically praised the idealized court as “that grammar school of courtesies / where wit and beauty learned their name.” Samuel Johnson told Boswell that Courtier was “the best book that ever was written about good breeding.”

  Etichetta remains so vital to social survival in Italy that the same word translates into both “etiquette” and “label.” To this day the way you present yourself in Italy marks you even before you open your mouth (another reason not to tromp through its cities in T-shirt and shorts).

  However, nothing constitutes a greater act of brutta figura than sounding or acting maleducato, a word that foreigners often mistake for “badly educated” but that translates as “ill bred” or “rude.” This word served me well when I was bumped off an overbooked flight from Rome several years ago. The ticket agent showed not a shred of sympathy until I added that the clerk had been quite rude. “Maleducato!” he repeated in horror. The next thing I knew, I had a hotel reservation for the night and an upgraded seat on the next morning’s flight.

  An Italian observing a display of graceless behavior is more likely to say that the offender “doesn’t know his galateo,” a reference to the first etiquette guide, written by Giovanni della Casa (1503–1556). This Florentine patrician, who admired Petrarch and befriended Bembo, moved to Rome in 1528 to pursue the genially decadent life of a gentleman poet.

  In the same spirit as Florence’s Crusconi, Della Casa and his witty friends established the Accademia de’ Vignaiuoli, the Academy of Vineyard Workers. In addition to stylish sonnets, he published clever, sophisticated, and (much to his subsequent regret) fashionably obscene verses, along with a treatise on whether a gentleman should take a wife. His answer, in this humorously misogynist rant, was a resounding no, especially if the man had scholarly or political ambitions.

  Della Casa had both. Like many talented men of his times, he entered the priesthood solely for its professional opportunities. Well spoken and well connected, he rose rapidly up the clerical ranks, eagerly accepting assignments less ambitious prelates might have dodged. As a pap
al taxman, Della Casa zealously collected tithes from all the Florentine territories. In his next posting, he established the Venice branch of the Inquisition and vigorously prosecuted heretics, including a bishop who taunted him with his unsavory early writings. Back in Rome, he drew up the city’s first Index of Prohibited Books, which included Machiavelli’s The Prince.

  The ambitious prelate seemed so clearly destined for glory that his friend, the poet Pietro Bembo, at the height of his fame, dedicated what proved to be his final sonnet—“a masterly farewell to poetry and to life,” his editor declared—to the man he crowned as his literary successor. It begins with a play on Della Casa’s name: “Casa [house], in which the virtues have their illustrious dwelling.” In an inflated style meant to convey his moral earnestness, Bembo praises their past achievements and links what he predicts will be their illustrious futures. “What worthier destiny can a couple hope for?” he asks.

  Della Casa was hoping someday to wear a cardinal’s crimson, which he yearned for so fiercely that he wrote verses about the nobility of the color. But the risqué poems of his youth, along with an illegitimate son (less of a problem), blocked his ascension. With the election of a new pope, Della Casa lost his patronage and retired to a country abbey in 1552. Only after his death, with the publication of his poetry, did he gain the acclaim he so craved. Some consider him the century’s best poetic stylist.

  Della Casa’s most famous and influential work, with a title immortalized in the Italian language, was Il Galateo, Ovvero de’ Costumi (The Galateo, or On Manners), derived from the name of his friend Bishop Galeazzo Florimonte, who urged him to write a manual of proper behavior, based on consideration, politeness, and pleasantness. Its first word—conciossiacosachè, a pretentious literary term for “since”—became one of the most infamous in Italian literature. This tongue twister so irritated a famous Italian dramatist that he hurled the slim volume out his window. It also convinced many people that this entertaining treatise is pedantic and boring.