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

by Dianne Hales

  In one of his poems Michelangelo says about listening to Vittoria, “I am at last made such that I can never be my own again.” He compares her spiritual influence over him to the power of an artist over his material. Just as he reworked a clay model or rough sketch until it finally resembled the original idea, Vittoria shaped to her idea of virtue the “unprized” form of Michelangelo, carving away excess just as he did with a sculpture to reveal the innate form within.

  In a tender letter to Vittoria, Michelangelo writes, “[I] wanted to do more for you than for anyone I have ever known on earth. But the great task [painting The Last Judgment] that I had and still have on hand prevented me from letting your Ladyship know this.” Vittoria’s death in 1547 shattered Michelangelo, who wrote a sonnet comparing her to a fire that had scorched him and left only embers.

  Yet Michelangelo never stopped working—or writing. “You will surely say that I must be old and mad for wanting to write sonnets, but since so many people say I’m in my second childhood, I wanted to act the part,” he wrote to his “dear friend” Giorgio Vasari in 1554. In the twilight of his life, Michelangelo produced some of his most haunting sculptures and ambitious architectural designs, including the dome of St. Peter’s.

  For a recent birthday, my daughter gave me a book of Michelangelo’s letters that reveals another side of him. A shrewd businessman, he bought up real estate for his brothers and nephews and, as an act of personal charity, provided dowries for poor Florentine girls so they could marry or buy their way into convents. But when angered, Michelangelo lashed out, warning his nephew Lionardo about “certain envious, scandal-mongering, low-lived scoundrels who write you a heap of lies because they can’t cheat or rob me. They are a bunch of vultures.… Don’t bother about my affairs, because I know how to look out for myself, and I’m not a child.”

  Michelangelo never flinched from what he was. “I am ill in body with all the ills that usually plague old men—the stone so that I can’t urinate, pains in my side, pains in my back, so that often I can’t climb the stairs,” he wrote. “Writing is very hard on my hand, my eyesight, and my memory. That’s what old age does!” The elderly artist became increasingly preoccupied with death. In a poignant verse, he wrote of being “betrayed by these fleeting days of mine, and by the mirror, which tells the truth to all who gaze in it.” He died a few weeks shy of his eighty-ninth birthday in 1564.

  Immersed in papal and civic projects in Rome, Michelangelo hadn’t set foot in Florence in two decades. Vasari claimed the “bad air” kept him away. However, the city fathers had no intention of allowing another celebrated son to spend eternity beyond its walls (as Dante does, in Ravenna). The pope had pledged to honor Michelangelo with a grand memorial in St. Peter’s, but the artist’s nephew spirited the corpse out of town.

  The great Florentine returned home twenty-five days after his death. Crowds surged into the basilica of Santa Croce for a glimpse of history’s most famous artist. A lieutenant overseeing the transport of the casket to the sacristy, unable to resist his curiosity, ordered that it be opened. According to Vasari’s eye witness account, Michelangelo’s body showed no signs of decomposition, but looked as if he were “only resting in a sweet and most tranquil sleep.”

  Almost immediately tributes in Latin and Italian—epitaphs, sonnets, verses, letters, odes—flooded the church. Michelangelo’s adoring fans couldn’t say enough about him. On Duke Cosimo’s orders, this display was left standing for many weeks as a tribute to the beloved artist. Michelangelo’s funeral, as majestic as a monarch’s, and his grandiose tomb in Santa Croce testified to the lofty status that Italian artists had attained since Cimabue’s day.

  No Italian artist has ever equaled this level of achievement or acclaim. “So does the story of the golden age of Italian art end with Michelangelo?” I ask my friend Ludovica Sebregondi, a professor of art history at the University of Florence. She hesitates a minute before mentioning another worthy name: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610). Through her, I found myself swept into a four-hundred-year-old mystery surrounding his death.

  Caravaggio, a baroque painter famed for his dramatic compositions and bold use of chiaroscuro, the contrast of darkness and light, dazzled Rome with his brilliance. His personal life oscillated between light and dark. Forever arguing and brawling, he killed a young man in a fight and had to flee Rome with a price on his head. For years he careened around southern Italy until he ended up in a prison in Malta. Caravaggio escaped, and the fugitive, wearying of life on the run, eventually won a papal pardon. However, his plans to return to Rome with paintings for his powerful patrons went terribly wrong.

  Thrown into jail in a small coastal town, Caravaggio bought his freedom with a large bribe, only to discover that the boat with his paintings and possessions had sailed north. He set out in pursuit, traveling by whatever means he could find, including by foot, in the midsummer heat. According to folklore, the desperate artist collapsed on the beach and died in the fishing village of Porto Ercole on the Tuscan coast. The paintings disappeared.

  Caravaggio’s death is the town’s sole claim to historic fame. I know. Every summer since 1990 Bob and I have come to this picturesque port, named for the mighty Hercules but lacking any distinguished museum, church, or work of art. However, its humble church may add more clues to the lingering mystery about the painter’s final days.

  As a special privilege, its pastor—who set the village buzzing when he honored us, mere itinerant Americans, by coming to dinner at our rented villa—allowed Ludovica to examine the official parish record book. We gathered around her as she opened the stained cover of the oversize ledger, which dates back to 1590.

  Ludovica turned the tattered pages slowly until she came to an envelope containing a torn piece of paper. As she read the bold black script out loud in Italian, I translated the words into English: “Here in Porto Ercole, 18 July 1609, died Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, painter, in the hospital, of an illness.”

  Was this the definitive answer to Caravaggio’s demise? Not at all. Historian’S were still haggling over the details of his death, Ludovica informed us. If this notice is genuine, the accepted historic date of the celebrated artist’s death—July 18, 1610—might be wrong. If it’s a fake, who inserted the bogus notice into the record book? When? And, most perplexingly why?

  “Molto emozionante!” (“Very exciting!”), Ludovica exclaimed after hours of scrutinizing the yellowed document. The gleam in her dark eyes reminded me that art in Italy doesn’t just hang on walls or pose on pedestals but speaks across time and space. On that serene summer day I too felt the thrill of entering—however distantly and indirectly—the storia of an artist, a creator of the beauty that never dies.

  “ARE YOU A MIMI OR A MUSETTA?” ASKS MAESTRO Mario Ruffini, a musicologist and composer in Florence, referring to the leading ladies—sweet-souled Mimi and coquettish Musetta—of Giacomo Puccini’s La bohème. An American might have tested my temperament (more Musetta than Mimi) with a choice between fiery Scarlett or placid Melanie from Gone with the Wind. But of course an Italian, especially one who spent years as an opera conductor, would think in terms of this wholly Italian invention.

  Opera, a splendid confection of music, words, drama, costumes, sets, special effects, and complete suspension of disbelief, could not have emerged in any other country. “Italian opera is the ultimate expression of the collective Italian genius—the Italian sun captured in sound,” says Maestro Ruffini. “It stems from the Italian nature, the Italian voice, the Italian soul.”

  Nothing looks like Italian opera. Nothing sounds like Italian opera. And no one (not even Petrarch, who inspired its language) speaks or has ever spoken the elevated idiom found in the libretto (little book) of virtually every classic Italian opera. As soon as she steps on stage, a donna (woman) becomes a beltà (beauty)—no matter how plain the singer—with lumi (lighted candles) for eyes. Rather than a chiesa (church), she goes to a tempio (temple), where sacri bronzi (sacred
bronzes) ring instead of campane (bells). Stage directions for battle scenes invariably call for the firing not of a cannone but of a bronzo ignivomo (fire-vomiting bronze). An impassioned suitor entreats his beloved, “Stringimi al seno,” usually translated as, “Draw me to your bosom.” But seno, a Roman physician informs me, refers more precisely to the delicate spot between a woman’s breasts.

  Absurd though it may be, opera’s stile gonfiato, or inflated style, can enchant—no less than the golden wings of music that carry the poetic words aloft. I fell under its spell long before I knew a single sentence in Italian. As a graduate student at Columbia, I would buy standing-room tickets to the Metropolitan or the New York City Opera and sidle into empty seats, working my way ever closer to the stage. At certain magical performances, the melding of words and music bypassed my ears and shot straight to my heart. I could actually feel it fluttering in my chest, directly beneath my seno.

  When I moved to San Francisco to marry a man who had never even been to an opera, I won him over slowly. On Saturday evenings we would anchor our little sailboat off Belvedere Island in the San Francisco Bay, watch the stars, and listen to broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera on a portable radio. Without the benefit of supertitles or a libretto, we had to listen with our hearts, intuiting what the singers were saying. Within a year, Bob was hooked, and we had student tickets (he was a psychiatry resident at the time) to the Friday-evening series at the San Francisco Opera.

  Back then I thought that learning Italian would help me understand opera better. Instead, the more I learned about la lirica, as Italians refer to opera, the better I understood Italian—and Italians. Phrases from its overwrought libretti percolate through the language. Every Alfredo sooner or later is implored, “Amami [Love me!], Alfredo!” from La traviata, and every Aida becomes “celeste Aida,” for Verdi’s celestial heroine. Men who shake my hand on a chilly day break into “Che gelida manina!” (“What a cold little hand!”) from La bohème. Thanks to la lirica, vendetta (vengeance) is always tremenda (terrible) as in Rigoletto, while lacrime (tears) are furtive (hidden) as in L’ elisir d’amore, and spiriti (spirits) bollenti (boiling hot), as in La traviata.

  Yet the source of these phrases, the opera libretto, remains the neglected stepchild of this most extravagant of arts, and librettists—who often lived as outrageously as their larger-than-life characters—have been eclipsed by composers, conductors, and, most of all, superstar singers. This was not the way things were some four hundred years ago when opera was born. The word—and its writers—came first.

  In the twilight of the Renaissance, a group of Florentine poets, philosophers, and professional musicians, who called themselves La Camerata (the salon), devoted themselves to recreating something that hadn’t been heard since ancient Greece—stage drama set to music. One evening in the late 1590s they presented Dafne, the story of an innocent maiden turned into a laurel tree to escape Apollo’s lustful pursuit, with a libretto by the poet Ottavio Rinuccini. The composers may have included Vincenzo Galileo, father of the illustrious astronomer, as well as Jacopo Peri, a young tenor nicknamed Zazzerino (long hair) for his mane of red-blond hair, who moved listeners to tears with his voice. The aristocratic audience had no idea they were listening to the first opera in musica, or work in music.

  In 1600 this new art form took another major step with the performance of the Greek myth Eurydice, with a libretto by Rinuccini and music by Peri, at the monthlong festivities for the wedding of Grand Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici to Christine de Lorraine. But opera’s true father was Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) of Cremona, Europe’s foremost composer of madrigals, love songs for several voices. The premiere of his Orfeo: favola in musica (Orpheus: A Fable in Music) on February 24, 1607, at the Gonzaga Palace in Mantua marked the debut of both the first modern opera and the first modern orchestra.

  Collaborating closely with Rinuccini, Monteverdi presented solos, duets, trios, and declamatory passages sung by small choruses. Italian gave names to these operatic inventions, such as aria (air), for a song sung by one singer; recitativo (recitative), for a semi-sung passage between set pieces of music; and arioso, for a cross between an aria and recitative that was very popular in early opera. Accompanying them was what seemed an outlandish assemblage of three dozen instruments, which became the model for all orchestras that followed.

  The new musical sensation spread throughout the peninsula as quickly as motion pictures would in the twentieth century. In Rome, the infatuated Barberini family built a three-thousand-seat theater to share opera’s pleasures with their friends. Clerics, including popes, cardinals, and their retinues, became devoted fans. Music-loving Naples enthusiastically welcomed the new diversion, which soon traveled throughout Europe.

  However, no city embraced opera with greater fervor than cosmopolitan Venice, which built the first public opera theaters and attracted a new, more egalitarian audience. “Monteverdi’s Venetian successors went on to create more operas with real people as subjects, further secularizing the art form and making it open to new themes and styles, including comedy,” writes Fred Plotkin in Opera 101. Thanks to them, Venice, “the New York City of its day” became the first great city of opera.

  By the end of the 1600s, Venetians were thronging to some sixteen opera houses, each located in a different parish of the city. Their appetite for new works—often different compositions based on the same libretto with new scenic effects—was insatiable. “It didn’t take long for the middle class to hijack what had been an aristocratic entertainment,” says Kip Cranna, musical director of my favorite company, the San Francisco Opera. Operagoers, who often came to the theater every night, ate dinner in their boxes or the less pricey parterre (the open area in front of the stage). During the performances, they gossiped, flirted, or played cards, pausing to marvel at an especially eye-popping special effect or intoxicating aria.

  To capture their distracted audience’s attention, librettists exaggerated everything. Huge casts tramped across the stage. Tortured plots usually showcased a knightly hero enduring arduous tribulations. Trapdoors opened with a hellish red glare to release or swallow demonic spirits. But everything always turned out for the best. For the requisite lieto fine (happy ending), a deus ex machina (“god from a machine” in Latin), such as the allegorical figure of glory, would descend from the rafters to save the day.

  By 1700 nearly four hundred different operatic works had been produced in Venice, but even its staunchest admirers agreed that ever-more-outlandish stunts were turning opera into a parody of itself. The librettist who came to its rescue once sang and recited verses for strangers on the streets of Rome—or so goes the most operatic version of the childhood of Pietro Trapassi. A wealthy intellectual adopted the boy and changed his name to Metastasio (from a Greek word meaning “change”). When his benefactor died, the twenty-year-old singer and poet inherited a fortune—which he quickly dissipated.

  The penniless Metastasio (1698–1782), renouncing feckless pursuits, went to work for a lawyer in Naples. After a few years he began writing anonymously for the Neapolitan theater. His alleged mistress, a famous soprano known as La Romanina, encouraged him to write his first libretto, Didone abbandonata (The Great Dido Abandoned). Its engaging verses hushed the noisiest opera house in Europe. Returning to Rome, Metastasio produced so many triumphant librettos that his name—often stamped on every page—became synonymous with opera seria (serious opera). In 1729 the Austrian emperor named him to the most prestigious musical post in Europe, that of Caesarean Poet in Vienna.

  As the cultural impresario of a powerful monarch, Metastasio wielded more influence than any librettist before or since. This purist, upholding the traditions of Greek tragedies, stripped opera of “vulgar” comic scenes, thundering choruses, and almost all movement. Metastasio’s verses, which he often read to admirers before they were set to music, practically swooned with Petrarchian imagery. “The waves that murmur between the shores,” a typical lyric read, “the air that trem
bles between the bows, is less fickle than your heart.” Almost every scene in his operas ended in an exit aria. The flamboyant castrati or voci bianche (white voices)—talented young boys castrated at puberty to preserve their remarkable singing range—exploited these to showcase their vocal pyrotechnics.

  Audiences looking for lighter fare turned to opera buffa, or comic opera, which first flourished in Naples. There local theaters presented comic operas, both in Italian and in dialect, on their own or as intermezzi between the acts of a serious opera. The cast, made up of actors who could sing rather than trained professional singers, portrayed stock characters from the traditional Commedia dell’Arte: stingy merchants, crafty servants, star-crossed lovers, lecherous old fools, pompous doctors, and flirtatious maids. The librettists, who mainly cobbled together classic comic situations, remained anonymous.

  The one exception was Carlo Goldoni (1707–1793), a Venetian playwright who adapted his works and others’ into comic operas. Although less influential than Metastasio, he revolutionized opera buffa by insisting on less improvisation and greater adherence to the written libretto. Goldoni’s spirited characters were as recognizable as next-door neighbors—toothpaste sellers, custodians of public baths, café owners, hunters, peasants. Rather than musing chastely about love, they engaged in lively give and take, punctuated with folksy epithets such as “Birboncello!” (“Rogue!”), “Bricconaccia!” (“Rascal!”), and “Furbacchiotto!” (“Trickster!”).

  Milan staked its claim as music capital of Italy on August 3, 1778, with the opening of Il Teatro alla Scala on “una serata afosa” (a hot muggy night). Newspaper reports described the theater as “magnifico, innovativo,” with tier upon tier of ornate boxes (palchi) and a compressed gallery of cheaper seats called loggione. People gambled in the foyer, exchanged visits from box to box, and ate dinner at a restaurant on the mezzanine or an osteria near the loggione. The servants of patrician families toted dinner from their houses.