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

by Dianne Hales

  This “paste” of flour and water (with an egg thrown in to make a “Sunday pasta”) remains the common denominator at Italian tables. At the Pasta Museum in Rome, tucked into a tiny piazza on the Quirinale Hill, I learned of pasta’s legendary origins: Once upon a time the muse Talia inspired a man named Macareo to construct a metal container with many tiny holes from which long strings of dough emerged as if by magic. He immediately cooked these maccheroni and served them to some hungry poets. Talia entrusted the secret of this wondrous device to the siren Partenope, who founded the city of Naples in the sixth or seventh century B.C.

  Based on more scientific archaeological research, we know that the early Romans subsisted on a diet of barley porridge and a pastalike dough mixture called langanum or lagana, which may have been the earliest form of a lasagna noodle (a word derived from the Latin nodellus, or “little knot”). As the city’s population grew, the government banned cooking fires in its crowded tenement apartments to prevent catastrophic blazes. Their occupants often brought home dishes from hot food stalls—the original takeout.

  When in Rome, I do as the ancient Romans did and buy fresh, piping hot pasta from Tony, an Egyptian cook who immigrated to Italy thirty years ago and sells delicious dishes da asporto (to carry away) to my apartment around the corner. Yet even when I ask for a single serving, Tony always packs up enough food for two (or more). I know why: eating alone is almost too sad to contemplate in Italy.

  Italian proverbs testify to the national antipathy to a table for one: “Chi mangia solo crepa solo” (“Who eats alone dies alone”). “Chi non mangia in compagnia è un ladro o una spia” (“Who doesn’t eat with a companion is a thief or a spy”). “Chi mangia solo si strozza a ogni mollica” (“Who eats alone chokes on every bite”). Sometimes these jests are playful ways of inviting a solitary diner to join a group. Often when I eat alone in Italy, entire families in a restaurant cordially lift their glasses to wish me a “buon appetito!” “È tradizionale,” a waiter once explained, as if he feared I’d take offense.

  The Italian tradition of writing about food dates back to the publication of the first known cookbook in the Western world in the fourth or fifth century: On Culinary Things, referred to as Apicius, for the Roman buon gustaio (food lover) Marcus Gabius Apicius. He probably wasn’t the author, says Gabriella Ganugi, who named her prestigious Apicius Culinary Academy in Florence in his honor, but he embodied the thoroughly Italian passion for eating well. When I find out that Ganugi, smart in every sense of the word, had studied law before pursuing a career as a chef, I ask about the origins of her passion for food. “Ah, signora,” she says, flicking back her long black hair, “surely you know: We do not so much pick our passions as they pick us.”

  The ancient Romans’ passion for unusual dishes inspired the first truly international cuisine. In an empire that stretched to the corners of the known world, all culinary roads led to Rome. Foods from conquered territories (and cooks to prepare them) made their way into the kitchens of the privileged and powerful—artichokes from Africa, cherries from Asia, pistachio nuts from Syria, ham from Gaul, dates from Egypt.

  Apicius conjures up scenes of lavish banquets where guests, reclining on couches around low tables, dined on exotic entrees such as camel, flamingo tongues, and roasted swan or parrot, all washed down with wine scented with rose leaves. Some Italian desserts date back to ancient times. According to culinary lore, Nero and other ancient Romans enjoyed flavored snow from nearby mountains—the original gelato.

  In the brutal Dark Ages after Rome’s fall, the staple that kept the population alive was minestra—soup brewed of roots, weeds, plants, and bits of meat (if any), stretched into an entire meal or a day or week of meals. The word minestra became synonymous with survival and a metaphor for what one does to get by in life. If you have the means to act as you wish, you can have any minestra you want, including a minestrone, or big hearty soup. If not, you have to settle for minestra riscaldata, the same old reheated fare. When you have used all your options, mangia la minestra o salta dalla finestra—eat the soup or jump out the window.

  Pasta reemerged in the Middle Ages. In an early travelogue written around 1154, an Arabian geographer described the production and drying of thin noodles he called itriyya (an Arabic word that Italians translated into vermicelli, or “little worms”) in a village in Sicily. Sailors probably transported this durable food to Genoa and Pisa, where maccheroni and vermicelli appear in personal wills and inventories—some on display at the Pasta Museum. These documents, its curators emphasize, clearly refute what they consider a preposterous claim—that pasta didn’t arrive in Italy until 1295, when Marco Polo introduced noodles from China.

  I can offer further (albeit unscientific) evidence in the form of a twelfth-century folktale a teacher gave me when I was struggling (as I still do) with the passato remoto. Written entirely in this arcane tense, it tells the story of a beautiful princess who lived in a castle with many cooks to prepare her meals—but none who could make a marinara sauce to her liking. One day a handsome young peasant offered her his recipe in return for her throne. After a taste of his sauce, she agreed. He grew old and tired governing the kingdom, while she enjoyed herself and lived to the age of one hundred. La morale della favola (the moral of the story): Sometimes it’s better to eat like a king than to be one.

  Medieval cucina principesca (princely cooking) tipped toward ostentation more than taste. Banquets featured exotic foods and expensive spices (so valuable they often served as currency) that testified to a host’s wealth and prestige. Veritable food orgies featured leather-tough eagles or peacocks, boiled and then roasted and smothered under pungent sauces. Royal cooks, who commanded astronomic salaries, handed recipes down orally like family secrets from one generation to the next. Among the few written in vernacular Italian was one that belonged to a dissolute young nobleman in thirteenth-century Siena.

  Renouncing his licentious life, this youth turned over to a nun his last prized possessions: a bag of precious spices and a recipe for a sumptuous sweetmeat that made generous use of them. The extravagant delicacy struck the good sister as unfit for a convent, so she gave the recipe to a bishop, who shared it with other food-loving clerics. Eventually it made its way to a cardinal’s brother named Ubaldino, a cook so renowned that Dante immortalized him as one of the insatiably hungry gluttons in his Purgatorio. Ubaldino’s downfall may have been the dish he created by adding almonds, hazelnuts, and candied fruits to the original recipe—the famed Sienese panforte (strong bread).

  About the same time, food made a spectacular literary debut in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. This lifelong buongu-staio conjured up il Paese di Bengodi (the land of good and plenty), where “there was a mountain made entirely of grated Parmesan cheese, on whose slopes were people who spent their time making macaroni and ravioli, which they cooked in chicken broth and then cast to the four winds. The faster one could pick it up, the more one got of it. And not far away, there was a stream of Vernaccia wine, the finest that was ever drunk, without a single drop of water in it.”

  With the dawn of the Renaissance, kitchens became the workshops of culinary artisans. The cooks of Duke Ercole d’Este of Mantua invented the golden eggy noodles called fettuccine as a culinary tribute to his son’s blond-tressed bride, the notorious Lucrezia Borgia. The navel of Venus inspired the cardinal of Bologna’s cook to fashion tortellini, although local gossip claimed the beguiling belly button actually belonged to an innkeeper’s daughter.

  The Renaissance increasingly emphasized simple, fresh, locally grown ingredients prepared in ways that brought out their true flavors—the essence of modern Italian cooking. The man behind this culinary revolution was Maestro Martino da Como, a combination of Mario Batali and Alice Waters, who cooked for a reverendissimo monsignor in Rome. Many details about this fifteenth-century master chef, including the years of his birth and death, remain unknown. However, his groundbreaking Art of Cooking took much of the mystery out of food pr
eparation by disclosing tricks of the trade that chefs had long kept hidden.

  Unlike previous manuals, which merely listed recipes and ingredients, Martino’s specified amounts, utensils, times, and techniques and spelled out every step of the cooking process. Dessert lovers should thank him for pioneering the use of large quantities of sugar (previously treated as a condiment like salt) to make sweet dishes.

  If Martino were alive, I have no doubt the Food Network would base a series on his culinary special effects. In a presentation of his “flying pie,” live birds, placed into a baked crust containing a smaller “real” pie, flitted into the air on serving—echoing the nursery rhyme about “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.” To create a fire-spewing peacock, Martino roasted the animal whole, replaced its feathers, and stuffed its beak with alcohol-soaked cotton, which he then set ablaze.

  Who wouldn’t tune in to watch a celebrity chef tackle Martino’s directions for “How to Make a Cow or Suckling Calf or Deer Appear to Be Alive?” After butchering and skinning the animal, he instructs, “make sure the hooves remain attached to the skin and flesh.” Use irons large enough to hold the beast standing up, then roast it slowly in an oven or over an open flame. When the meat is cooked, nail the irons to a large table and dress the animal with its skin to hide the irons. “Note,” he adds, “that in order to prepare animals with such ingenuity, the cook must be neither a madman nor a simpleton, but he must have a great brain.”

  Bartolomeo Sacchi, better known as Platina, certainly had one. A humanist scholar, Vatican librarian, and contemporary of Martino, Platina obtained one of the few manuscripts of Martino’s book, written in vernacular Italian. Translating Martino’s recipes into Latin, he added ten of his own, along with a treatise on his humanist, life-savoring beliefs. His combination cookbook and philosophical treatise, De honesta voluptate et valetudine (On Right Pleasure and Good Health), published in 1494 in the universal language of Latin, became the first international culinary best seller.

  No one might have known of Martino’s contribution if not for an American chef and hotelier named Joseph Dommers Vehling. In 1927 this bibliophile purchased a copy of Martino’s original manuscript (one of five known to exist) from an Italian antiquarian and recognized the recipes. His scholarly work, Platina and the Rebirth of Man, published in 1941, finally rescued Maestro Martino from anonymity. Stefania Barzini, a Roman chef and food historian, updated Martino’s recipes for a recent English edition of The Art of Cooking published by the University of California Press. She includes instructions for “how to dress a suckling pig,” but none for a flame-breathing peacock or standing calf.

  In the Renaissance the men who butchered and carved meat became as celebrated as chefs. At courtly banquets—occasions for theater as much as taste—the scalco (carver) played an all-important role: he sliced each guest’s serving on the basis of his or her social rank, an exacting assignment that inspired Italian’s elaborate vocabulary for cuts of meat. A duke might rate a fesa (a tender cut from the top side of the hindquarters); a lesser dignitary, a scamone (top rump).

  In honor of our all-American holiday, the Fourth of July, Lina, the cook at the castello of Monte Vibiano Vecchio, prepared tacchino (turkey)—not a Thanksgiving-style whole stuffed roasted bird, but a massive turkey leg, which she grilled in the enormous fireplace. After carrying out the huge brontosauro, as she called it, she immediately turned to Bob and handed him the carving knives.

  “Allo scalco!” the Italians at the table cried out. “To the carver!”

  The first person to export the Italian way of cooking, eating, and entertaining was Catherine de’ Medici (1519–1589). Already a buona forchetta (hearty eater) at age fourteen, when she married the future French king Henry II, she took along chefs, bakers, confectioners, and cupbearers as well as recipes. As the wife of one king and the mother of three others, Catherine changed what the French ate (introducing foods such as artichokes and spinach Florentine style) and the way they ate it, although her husband never got the hang of the newfangled forks she brought to the table. Parisians quickly strove to dine à la mode de la Reine, and French cooking soon became the dominant international cuisine.

  The English didn’t take as readily to Italian culinary innovations. A British tourist, noting that “all men’s fingers are not alike clean,” praised the Italian forchetta. However, many of his countrymen mocked the pronged food piercer as pretentious and lampooned its users as “forkifers.”

  A British ex-pat in Florence once tried to convince me that English roast beef had inspired the city’s sizzling specialty, bistecca alla fiorentina. “Non è vero” (“It’s not true”), said the waiter who served my daughter and me a sensational slab of Tuscany’s fine Chianina beef at a restaurant right on the Arno called Golden View (local friends had recommended it despite its cheesy English name). The Medici, he explained, would cook and serve these tender steaks to the people of Florence on the feast of Saint Lorenzo, the family’s patron. Some English travelers in the throng once eagerly cried out for servings of what they called “beef steak.” Italians took up the chant of “bistecca,” and the English derivative stuck to “la fiorentina.”

  When pasta officially reached England after “the peace of 1763,” as one historian recorded, it quickly earned a place in London’s new restaurants. However, their bewigged, foppish clients—along with dandified British tourists besotted with all things Italian—were mocked as “macaroni,” a taunt that made its way into the verses of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

  Neapolitans, once called mangiafoglie (leaf eaters) for the green vegetables in their diet, gained the nickname of mangiamaccheroni (macaroni eaters) in the eighteenth century. Street vendors called maccaronari cooked spaghetti on rustic stoves and sold them, seasoned only with grated cheese, by the handful. Prints from the time, hung in the Pasta Museum, show ragged urchins dangling the long strands high above their heads and dropping il ghiotto cibo—which translates as both the “appetizing” and the “greedy” food—into their open mouths. “The difference between the king and me is that the king eats as much spaghetti as he likes,” an old Neapolitan saying goes, “while I eat as much as I’ve got.”

  Neapolitan cooks were the first to pair pasta with its perfect mate, the tomato, an import from South America. The pomodoro, or golden apple, moved north with Garibaldi’s troops, who first sampled pasta with tomato sauce in their march up the peninsula. Naples’s other specialty—pizza—also merits a mention in Italian’s history.

  The Bourbon king Ferdinand I, ruler of Naples in the nineteenth century, became so addicted to the creations of a certain Antonio Testa that he would dress up in shabby clothes to sneak into his pizzeria. His successor Ferdinand II invited another pizzaiolo, Don Domenico Testa, to come to his palace and bake pizzas for the ladies of the court. As a tribute he bequeathed to Testa the title Monsieur, usually reserved for the chefs de cuisine of royal households. Monsù, as the Neapolitans pronounced the honorific, became a nickname for the city’s pizza bakers.

  One monsù created a classic in 1889, on the occasion of King Umberto I and Queen Margherita’s visit to the city. When the queen asked for a pizza, the pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito used green basil, white mozzarella, and red tomatoes, the new state’s official colors, to create the first pizza Margherita. An official letter of recognition from the queen’s “head of table services” remains on display at Esposito’s shop, now the Pizzeria Brandi.

  But long after Umberto and Margherita’s reign, the “new” Italians continued to eat and speak like the “old” Pisans, Luccans, Sicilians, or Genovese they had always been. The man who almost single-handedly overcame regional divisions to create a truly national cuisine was neither chef nor butcher, but a retired merchant and banker. Pellegrino Artusi (1820–1911), born in Forlimpopoli in Emilia-Romagna, renowned for its opulent cuisine, might never have ventured beyond his staid hometown if not for a dastardly deed that has grown into a local legend.

  In the tumultuous
mid-1800s, masked brigands swathed in long black capes terrorized travelers and townspeople throughout Emilia-Romagna. The most infamous was the dastardly Passatore, the Ferryman, nicknamed for his father’s occupation. On January 25, 1851, Forlimpopoli’s leading citizens gathered for a much-anticipated performance at the local theater. In the middle of the show, Passatore’s men burst onto the stage and blocked the exits. Forcing the hostages to surrender their house keys, they plundered the town.

  According to John Dickie’s detailed account in Delizia! The Epic History of Italians and Their Food, the bandits pistol-whipped Artusi, “a shy, shortsighted, hemorrhoidal bachelor of thirty.” Some of his sisters managed to hide; one suffered a knife wound to the head, and another, Geltrude, was “manhandled and contaminated,” in Artusi’s words. The bandits rampaged the home, stealing money and precious possessions. Geltrude never recovered from the trauma and lived out her days in the equivalent of a psychiatric facility. The rest of the family relocated to Florence, where Artusi prospered as a self-styled banker, trader, voracious scholar, and most of all, as he put it, a passionate seeker “of the good and the beautiful wherever [he found] them”—particularly in kitchens.

  Once he retired at age fifty—già ricco (already rich), his biographers note—the lifelong bachelor transformed his kitchen into a culinary laboratory. A portly man with a bushy white walrus mustache that extended to his sideburns, Artusi cajoled recipes from chefs, cooks, friends’ wives, and an intriguing assortment of female acquaintances. Over years of tinkering and testing, his two cooks complained that he drove them crazy with his experiments. In time Artusi compiled 475 recipes, along with down-to-earth advice on health and nutrition, into a thick volume worthy of its impressive title, La scienza in cucina l’arte di mangiar bene (Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well).