by Dianne Hales
Il Galateo is anything but. Assuming the persona of an idiota, an ignorant old man, instructing a youngster, Della Casa doles out wise, witty, and timeless recommendations in folksy colloquialisms: Don’t bray like an ass when you yawn. Don’t shamble, stomp, or shake your bottom like a peacock wiggling its tail. Don’t drone on about your senseless dreams or adorable children. Don’t interrupt, lie, bad-mouth, flatter, brag, pick your teeth, scratch yourself in public, or make fun of the deformed.
Emily Post herself could not offer a more sensible observation than this: “When you have blown your nose, you should not open your handkerchief and look inside, as if pearls or rubies might have cascaded from your brain. This is a disgusting habit which is not apt to make anyone love you, but rather if someone loved you already, he is likely to stop there and then.” Surely anyone who’s ever dined at a rib joint on dollar night would recognize the voracious eaters Della Casa describes as “totally oblivious, like pigs with their snouts in the swill, never raising their faces nor their eyes, let alone their hands, from the food in front of them.”
After Il Galateo’s publication in 1558, Della Casa’s little book of graces became must-reading for all aspiring to hoist themselves a rung higher up the social ladder. Its regularly updated versions remain essential self-help guides to modern-day dilemmas. The most recent edition exhorts both sexes not to engage in online bickering (the onomatopeic battibecco), reminds women who dye their hair to touch up their roots, and directs men to remove black socks when otherwise nude and not to put their feet on a table as if they were a Texas oilman (petroliere texano). I’ve taken to heart its thoughtful suggestion of never closing the front door after guests leave but waiting, as well-bred Italians do, until they walk or drive away.
Della Casa, I discovered by chance, is buried in Sant’ Andrea delle Fratte, which stands across the street from my apartment in Rome. I think of him whenever I hang my lingerie out to dry on the balcony overlooking the church and worry, Would he take offense at this somewhat immodest display?
Yet for all the advice the Italian equivalents of Miss Manners dispense on the subject of le buone maniere (good manners), none has helped me with what I consider one of the most confounding aspects of Italian: how to address another person. While you are always “you” in English, regardless of age, gender, rank, or number, in Italian you might be tu, Lei, voi, or (if you happen to be royalty or a pontiff) Ella. As a direct or indirect object, “you” becomes te, ti, La, Le, or vi. Other languages that distinguish between formal and informal terms of address also pose a problem for English speakers, but only in Italian can the choice of a second-person designation spell the difference between bella or brutta figura.
In the living room of her gracious apartment, with a view across the Tiber toward the Piazza del Popolo, I ask the linguist Valeria della Valle why Italian has made the straightforward task of starting a dialogue so damnably difficult. Don’t blame the Romans, she tells me. They used tu a tutti, the casual “you,” to everyone, from slave to emperor. In the Middle Ages, their Italian descendants, wanting to accord special respect to worthier persons, began using the plural voi for someone as valuable as two lesser tu’s.
Dante provides some excellent examples. In the Divine Comedy, his pilgrim “dà del tu” (gives the informal “you”) to almost everyone. The exceptions are characters of great importance, such as the father of his poet friend Cavalcante Cavalcanti and the intellectual Brunetto Latini, whom Dante considered his maestro—although he damns him nonetheless. When he comes upon Latini with the sodomites in hell, he displays great surprise and asks, using the plural “you” form, “Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto?” (“Are you here, Sir Brunetto?”). Until the twentieth century children and grandchildren said voi out of respect when talking to their parents and grandparents. Many southern Italian dialects that date back to medieval times still use voi as a polite form of address.
Sometime in the 1500s, probably in the resplendent courts of the day, voi gave way to Lei, the word for “she.” Contrary to a common assumption among Italians, Lei did not derive from the Spanish (who used usted for their formal “you”), but is “una forma italianissima,” says Professoressa della Valle, that stands for la Sua eccellenza (Your Excellency), a feminine noun. And so when you are talking to someone with whom you are not, as she puts it, “in confidenza,” or familiar with, you address him or her as a woman and use the third-person rather than the second-person verb forms.
If this explanation seems complicated, imagine figuring out these social and grammatical niceties dozens of times a day with every person you meet. And heaven forbid you should get thirsty in Italy! One of my grammar books provides a list of sixteen ways to ask for a glass of water (bicchiere d’acqua)!*
All convey the desire for a drink, but their use depends on where you are and whom you’re asking. “Le sarei grato se avesse la cortesia di darmi un bicchiere d’acqua,” which translates as, “I would be grateful if you would have the courtesy of giving me a glass of water,” might win you an invitation to dine with a duke. “Ohè, questo bicchiere d’acqua, me lo porti!”—“Hey, that glass of water, bring it to me!”—might get you tossed out the door.
When I first started studying Italian many years ago, I decided to dodge the formal-familiar dilemma entirely by learning only the polite Lei form of address. I honestly figured I wouldn’t get to know anyone well enough to need il tu. (This happily turned out not to be the case.)
One day when I was jogging on a country road in Tuscany an agitated man ran up to me and explained that his dog was trapped in a steep ravine. He could push him from behind, but would I call the dog to come to me? He, of course, addressed me in the respectful Lei form. And I, knowing no other, did the same with the dog. The man nearly fell over laughing at the sound of my oh-so-polite imprecations, which translated as, “Mister Dog, would you please be so kind as to come to me?”
Mussolini, seeking a more virile language for his megalomaniacal vision of the Italian nation, substituted the comradely voi, the plural “you all,” for Lei. Throughout the Fascist era, voi was obligatory in schools, public offices, movies, radio, and public ceremonies. Failure to use voi constituted an unpatriotic act and could result in the favored form of intimidation: huge doses of castor oil, which ignominiously destroyed any trace of bella figura. (The reputed originator of this demoralizing practice was the poet, novelist, and self-declared “superman,” Gabriele D’Annunzio.) After the war, il voi as a form of address for just one person survived only in the mouths of American movie stars. Thanks to Italian dubbers, Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart, and Grace Kelly always addressed their costars as if they were Fascist loyalists.
As a woman, I’ve learned that when talking to a man I must be the one to suggest that we darci del tu (give each other the informal “you”)—unless, like most of my sources, he is more important than I or he’s Roberto Benigni, who used il tu in our first conversation. Professoressa della Valle, now my friend Valeria, was the first distinguished scholar whom I tentatively asked about “tu-ing each other.” “But Diana,” she said sweetly, “I have been using il tu.” I’d been so busy concentrating on the gist of the interview that I hadn’t noticed.
Perhaps Italians are innately more fluent in the language of courtesy. I have never entered an Italian’s home, however humble, without being offered something to eat or drink. An Italian guest has never arrived at my doorstep empty-handed. At the beginning of an interview, many Italian men take a dramatic moment to reach inside their coat jackets, retrieve their cell phones, and switch them off with a courtly flourish.
Troppo bello, meno buono. Too much of the beautiful and less of the good, some of my Italian friends say cynically. But I relish the flourishes of bella figura, each an opportunity to transform minor interactions into memorable interludes. When I confide my perspective to Enrico Paoletti, president of the Società Dante Alighieri in Florence, his elfin face lights up.
“Ah, signora, you are lear
ning the Italian secret!” he exclaims.
“And what is that?”
“Our greatest art: the art of living.”
*Le sarei grato se avesse la cortesia di darmi un bicchiere d’acqua.
Abbia la cortesia di darmi un bicchiere d’acqua.
Vorrei un bicchiere d’acqua.
Mi dia un bicchiere d’acqua.
Le dispiacerebbe darmi un bicchiere di acqua?
Avrei bisogno di un bicchiere d’acqua.
Dammi un bicchiere d’acqua.
Portami un bicchiere d’acqua.
Da’qua questo bicchiere d’acqua.
Chi mi dà un bicchiere d’acqua?
Un bicchiere d’acqua, per favore.
Che ne diresti di un bicchiere d’acqua?
Vorrei un bicchiere d’acqua.
Che voglia di un bicchiere d’acqua!
La disturbo se le chiedo un bicchiere d’acqua?
Ohè, questo bicchiere d’acqua, me lo porti?
FOR CENTURIES “ITALY” HAS BEEN SYNONYMOUS with art. An estimated 60 percent of the world’s designated art treasures resides within its borders, and Italian paintings and sculptures grace museums and collections around the globe. But Italy did more than inspire masterpieces: it developed the visual language of Western culture and changed forever our concepts of beauty and its creators.
A thousand years ago Italian—or, more precisely, the Florentine dialect of the time—had no words for “art” or “artist.” Arte meant “guild,” a collective of specialists in a certain field. (The greater “arts” were judges and notaries, cloth weaving, exchange, wool, silk, physicians and apothecaries, and furriers. The lesser “arts” included butchers, shoemakers, carpenters, innkeepers, bakers, and so on.) Painters, who belonged to the same guild as doctors and apothecaries, and sculptors, members of the guild of stone masons and woodworkers, were artigiani, or artisans, anonymous craftsmen who worked with their hands, usually for low pay and little, if any, recognition.
This began to change in the late-thirteenth century with the emergence of a painter unlike any who had come before. We know him as Cimabue (Ox-head), a nickname his stubbornness may have earned. In Florence in 1286 Cimabue completed a panel of the Madonna surrounded by angels for the Church of Santa Maria Novella. The large figures, more lifelike than any previous works, so stunned the townspeople that they carried the painting with great rejoicing and the sounding of trumpets in a triumphant procession through the city streets to the church.
Cimabue (c. 1240–c. 1302) may have been the first celebrity artist, but an even greater talent, his apprentice Giotto di Bon-done (1277–1337), soon eclipsed him. “In painting Cimabue thought he held the field,” Dante Alighieri wrote in the Divine Comedy, “and now it’s Giotto they acclaim.” Cimabue himself, observing his pupil’s remarkable progress, commented, in a phrase still used in Italy, “L’ allievo ha superato il maestro” (“The pupil has surpassed the teacher”). Within a few years, painters throughout Italy were trying to emulate Giotto’s ability to make paintings breathe.
As Giotto’s fame grew, the pope sent a representative to Tuscany to learn more about the artist and his work. When asked for a sample to take to the pontiff, Giotto dipped a brush in red, pressed his arm to his side to make a compass of it, and with a turn of his hand made an impeccable circle on a piece of paper.
“Am I to have no other drawing than this one?” the flummoxed courtier asked.
“It’s more than sufficient,” answered Giotto.
As soon as the pope learned how Giotto had created the sample, he immediately realized that the artist did indeed surpass all other painters of his time. As this tale spread, it gave rise to the expression “più tondo dell’O di Giotto” (“rounder than Giotto’s O”), for someone slow or dense.
Two centuries after Giotto, the greatest artistic flowering the world has ever seen took place in Italy. The man who gave la rinascita (for rebirth), or the Renaissance, its name was a prolific (if prosaic) painter and respected architect, Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), who wrote the first book of art history. He called artists artefici, creators of beauty like God himself, touched with the same genius that lifted poets above less noble souls.
As a young apprentice, Vasari saved one of the Renaissance’s artistic icons. In 1527, in a pitched battle in the heart of Florence, the republican forces in power at the time threw a bench from a window of the Palazzo Vecchio, the city hall, onto Medici loyalists attacking the building. It struck the town’s prized symbol of freedom, Il Gigante, Michelangelo’s colossal David, and broke its arm.
When the fighting subsided, Vasari darted out of the besieged palazzo to retrieve the pieces. After keeping them safe for years, he finally repaired the mutilated sculpture in 1543, after Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, a distant cousin of Lorenzo il Magnifico, came to power. Vasari became Cosimo’s cultural impresario and oversaw massive construction projects, including the Uffizi (offices), home of many Renaissance treasures, and painted dozens of often monumental works.
Yet Vasari would surely have been overshadowed by his more dazzling contemporaries if not for a dinner conversation at Rome’s Palazzo Farnese around 1543. The A-list dinner guests, swapping reminiscences of the artistic giants who had beautified Italy, worried that their stories might soon be forgotten and lost forever. A scholarly bishop agreed to compile a learned treatise about them in Latin, but he soon turned the project over to the boundlessly energetic Vasari. After traveling widely to contemplate works of art and to interview people who had known artists of earlier times, he told their stories in an engaging, reportorial Italian that illuminated both the masterpieces and the masters behind them.
The first edition, entitled The Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors, from Cimabue up to Our Own Times: Described in the Tuscan Language but referred to simply as Le vite (The Lives) in Italian, came out in 1550; a second, more inclusive version, in 1568. Although dates and details have proven unreliable, Vasari did something no one else had: he made artists as immortal as their works. As the aging Michelangelo wrote in a laudatory sonnet, Vasari had brought the dead back to life and prolonged the life of the living—or the half-living, like himself, he added.
Vasari’s language captured the vision of Michelangelo and his contemporaries, who prized la difficultà (difficoltà in contemporary Italian), the technical and aesthetic challenges of creating works of beauty. (Lorenzo il Magnifico argued that la difficultà was also what imbued the Italian vernacular with dignity.) Michelangelo considered sculpture superior to painting because of both its difficultà and the need for greater giudizio dell’occhio (judgment of the eye).
Both painters and sculptors strove not just to overcome la difficultà but to do so with la facilità, the artistic equivalent of Castiglione’s sprezzatura, or seemingly effortless ease. When they succeeded, their works inspired reactions such as meraviglia, a sense of marvel or extraordinary delight, and stupore, which David Summers defines in Michelangelo and the Language of Art as “the state resulting from the perception of a thing that exceeded the limits of the senses.”
I experienced both these sensations in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence’s Santa Maria del Carmine Church. Like generations of artists, I sat before the murals painted by Tommaso Guido (1401–1428), mesmerized by their raw emotional power. However, only in reading Vasari did I discover that their creator was so on fire with “le cose dell’arte” (literally “the things of art” or artistic matters) that he paid no attention to the clothes he wore, the food he ate, the money he received or owed—and went down in history as Masaccio, or Messy Tom.
The painter known as Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510), nicknamed for his brother’s trade as a barrel maker, emerges in Vasari’s pages as a clever practical joker. In one elaborate prank, he arranged to sell a tondo (a circular painting) of the Virgin Mary surrounded by angels by his apprentice Biagio for six gold florins. He instructed Biagio to hang it high in good light so they could displa
y it to the potential buyer in the morning.
That evening Botticelli and one of his pupils made eight red paper hoods, similar to those worn by the Signoria (governing body) of Florence, and attached them with wax to the heads of the angels. When Biagio arrived along with the potential buyer (who was in on the joke), he was horrified. But the buyer praised the work, and Biagio followed him home to get his payment. Meanwhile Botticelli removed the hoods so that “his angels had become angels again and were no longer citizens in hoods.”
“Master, I don’t know if I’m dreaming or if this is real,” Biagio said when he returned. “When I came here those angels had red hoods on their heads and now they don’t—what does this mean?” Botticelli convinced him that the money must have gone to his head.
“If what you say were true, do you think the man would have bought the painting?” he asked.
The sensual stylist who conjured Venus from the sea and scattered hundreds of Tuscan wildflowers through Primavera, his exaltation of spring, was also a serious literary scholar. In Vasari’s opinion, Botticelli “wasted a great deal of time” illustrating and writing a commentary on Dante’s Divine Comedy and squandered whatever money he did earn. Swayed by Savonarola’s fiery rhetoric, he reportedly threw some of his own works on the infamous Bonfires of the Vanities in the late-fifteenth century. If not for the financial support of Lorenzo il Magnifico and his friends, the impoverished artist—who became so infirm that he hobbled about on two canes—might have starved.
The words of other artists, as Vasari recorded them, provide insight into their characters. When Donatello (1386–1466), christened Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi but so lovable that his family’s fond diminutive nickname stuck, showed Filippo Brunelleschi a crucifix he had painstakingly carved in wood, he expected a compliment. Instead the blunt Brunelleschi (1377–1446) asked him why he had put the body of a peasant rather than that of the divine son of God on the cross.