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

by Dianne Hales

  Publius Ovidius Naso (43 B.C.–A.D. 18), better known as Ovid and nicknamed the Nose, is best known for his collection of classical myths in the Metamorphoses and his scandalous Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), a primer on flirting and seduction that included advice on how to pick up women at a race or gladiator bout: “Press your thigh against the woman sitting next to you,” he suggested. “If by chance a speck of dust falls in the girl’s lap, as it may, let it be flicked away by your fingers, and if there’s nothing, flick away the nothing: let anything be a reason for you to serve her.”

  Ovid’s advice to women: Arrive late. “Delay enhances charm; delay’s a great bard,” he noted. “Plain you may be, but at night you’ll look fine to the tipsy. Soft lights and shadows will mask your faults.” The urbane work, aimed at worldly Romans, was so successful that Ovid wrote a sequel, Remedia Amoris (Remedies for Love). But the worst of fates, as Ovid saw it, befell him. He was exiled from Rome to a remote village on the Black Sea in the fallout of a scandal involving Emperor Augustus’s promiscuous daughter Julia.

  Ovid deals with greater tragedy in the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, the doomed lovers who grew up next door to each other in ancient Babylon. Through a chink in the common wall separating their houses, the youngsters, forbidden by their families from seeing each other, would whisper and, as they grew older, try to kiss. Plotting to run away together, they arranged to meet at a mulberry tree, but when Pyramus arrived, he found only a lion’s tracks and Thisbe’s torn and bloodied cloak (his gift to her).

  Assuming she had been killed, Pyramus stabbed himself beneath the tree. Thisbe, however, had only dropped her cloak while fleeing a lion, and the beast had ripped the garment with paws bloody from an earlier kill. When she found the dying Pyramus, she killed herself with his sword (her gift to him) as he opened his eyes to gaze once more upon her. The fruit of the mulberry, once white, turned red with their blood—or so the legend goes. This story, enacted with tragicomical brio in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream by the artisan actors, also was an archetype for the story of Romeo and Juliet’s thwarted love.

  We meet another ill-fated couple in the most poignant of Boccaccio’s novelle in the Decameron, Ghismonda, beloved daughter of Tancredi, the Prince of Salerno, and Guiscardo, a young valet “of exceedingly humble birth, but noble in character and bearing.” Ghismonda was as beautiful a creature as there ever was—youthful, vivacious, and possessed of “rather more intelligence than a woman needed.” After a brief marriage, she returned as a widow to her father’s house, but he showed no interest in arranging a second marriage. The eye of the lonely, frustrated young woman fell on Guiscardo, and the two found a way for him to tunnel into the castle and make his way into her room.

  When Tancredi discovered the lovers together in his daughter’s bed, he thundered at his servant, who did not defend himself but simply said, “Neither you nor I can resist the power of love.” Charging Ghismonda with betrayal of him and of her class by choosing “a youth of exceedingly base condition,” Tancredi decided to crush her passion by ordering his men to strangle Guiscardo and remove his heart. He had the heart delivered to his daughter in a golden chalice with the message, “To comfort you in the loss of your dearest possession, just as you have comforted me in the loss of mine.”

  Ghismonda wept over her lover’s heart “in a fashion wondrous to behold, her tears gushing forth like water from a fountain.” When she finally stopped crying, she poured a vial of poison into the chalice where the heart lay bathed in her own abundant tears and drank the mixture. As her father entered her room, she asked with her dying breath that the two lovers who could not be together in life be buried together forever in death. And so they were.

  The world’s most famous lovers, Romeo and Juliet, may have actually lived and died in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. The oldest known written version of their fate dates back to 1476, when Masuccio Salernitano (named for his hometown of Salerno) recounted the story of two star-crossed lovers named Mario and Gianozza of Siena in Il Novellino. The author swore “heaven to witness, that the whole of them [his novelle] are a faithful narrative of events occurring during his own times.”

  A more stylistically sophisticated writer, Luigi da Porto (1485–1529) renamed the lovers Giulietta and Romeus (later Romeo) in his Historia novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amanti (Newly Refound History of Two Noble Lovers), published about 1530. Da Porto relocated the tale to Verona and created the characters of the garrulous nurse, Mercutio, Tybalt, Friar Laurence, and Paris. He insisted that he had heard the story as a soldier in Friuli from one of his archers as they marched along a desolate road.

  Da Porto ends his account with a dramatic twist: Romeo, discovering Juliet’s seemingly lifeless body, drinks a vial of poison and wraps his arms around her—just as her sleeping potion wears off. In what would have made a hell of a theatrical finale, Juliet, realizing that it is too late to counter the poison he swallowed, beats her breast, tears her hair, throws herself upon Romeo, all but drowns him in tears, and imprints desperate kisses on his lips.

  “Must I live a moment after you?” she cries. Romeo, already dead in Shakespeare’s script, begs her to live, as does Friar Laurence. Then, in a made-for-the-spotlights moment, Juliet, “feeling the full weight of her irreparable loss in the death of her noble husband, resolute to die, draws in her breath and retaining it for some time, suddenly utters a loud shriek and falls dead by her lover’s side.”

  The British writer Arthur Brooke translated the Italian tales into English verse in 1562; William Painter retold the story in prose in 1582. Shakespeare plucked his plot from these translations when he wrote his play in 1595–96. In all versions, the hatred that had torn the couple’s families apart dissolves in the mingled blood of their dead children. But Shakespeare’s final lines deserve to be the last word on the tearful tale: “For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”

  The young Romeos who pursued my tall, blond, blue-eyed daughter, Julia, during a college summer in Italy seemed far more interested in living than dying for love. In Florence, the local boys proclaimed that she was their Beatrice and they her doting Dantes. Roses appeared before her at restaurant tables; smitten swains serenaded her with songs. “Ecco!” one young man called out on the street. “It is my heart, which has fallen for you!” After she and her friends hiked (in bikinis and Adidas) the breathtaking Via dell’Amore, the trail of love, in Cinque Terre, Julia dove into the azure bay and surfaced to find, as she describes him, the most beautiful guy she’d ever seen extending a hand from his boat and calling her “la mia sirena” (“my mermaid”).

  Could one expect anything less from the countrymen of Giovanni Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798), whose name has become synonymous with seduction? Curious about the infamous lothario’s way with words, I discovered that this romancer’s life was full of sex and almost devoid of love.

  Casanova’s mother, the actress Zanetta Farusi, had a reputation as a beauty who generously shared her charms with princes, noblemen, and wealthy merchants. While she toured Europe with the Teatro italiano, her son grew up in Venice in his grandmother’s care. By his own account Casanova lost his virginity when he was sixteen to two teen-aged sisters whose aunt he had befriended.

  Although his mother wanted him to enter the priesthood, Casanova was expelled from the seminary in Padua after being discovered in bed with a fetching companion. Still wearing the robes of an apprentice priest, he became the secretary of a Spanish cardinal in Rome—only to lose that job after engineering the scandalous abduction of a noble Roman young lady. He enlisted in the Venetian army and seduced women at every garrison. Back in Venice, he tried acting but could only get work playing the violin at theaters and balls.

  On his way home one night, Casanova accepted a ride in the gondola of an elderly gentleman, who within minutes suffered some sort of paralyzing attack. Casanova ran to the home of the nearest doctor, dragged him out of bed to treat his benefactor, and k
ept vigil at his bedside until he recovered. The wealthy nobleman, convinced that Casanova possessed supernatural powers, installed him in comfort in his palazzo and supported him with a generous allowance.

  Casanova’s career as a conquistatore moved into high gear. His appetite for women was omnivorous, and his effect on women, as the Italian writer and journalist Luigi Barzini described it, was stupefying: “He pleased women at first sight, women of all ages and conditions, and usually succeeded in rendering them helpless and defenseless in front of his pressing entreaties. His physical capacity to satisfy the most exacting mistress by renewing his homages to her a practically unlimited number of times through the night and the following day, with only short entr’actes, between the exertions, is not as surprising as the feat of psychological endurance; he admired one woman after another, and slipped into bed at a moment’s notice with the fat, the lean, the young, the old, the dirty, the soignée, the lady, the chambermaid, the strumpet, the nun, always admirably animated, till very late in life, by the same school-boyish eagerness.” His estimated lifetime conquests numbered more than two hundred.

  Casanova’s gambling and whoring tested even Venice’s tolerance, and he had to flee the city for France. When he returned a few years later, he was denounced as a Freemason, a spy, and a dabbler in black magic, serious crimes that landed him in the Venetian republic’s most dreaded dungeon, I Piombi, the plural of “lead,” perhaps for all the chains and bars in the belowground cells. After fifteen months of cunning plotting, he pulled off the impossible and escaped to Paris.

  There he found a new patron, the Duchess of Urfe, noble, rich, and gullible, who invested a small fortune in Casanova’s experiments in developing a potion to restore her to eternal youth. The clever con man also persuaded the French government to commission him to organize and run a state lottery, based on the Venetian model. This enterprise proved so lucrative that Casanova lived in splendor, with a luxurious house, servants, horses and carriages, and an estimated twenty mistresses whom he kept in twenty different apartments.

  A witty conversationalist, Casanova hobnobbed with intellectuals (including Voltaire and the visiting Benjamin Franklin), polished his friend Lorenzo da Ponte’s libretto for Don Giovanni, launched a silk manufacturing business, skipped around Europe (often in flight from debtors or prison), fought numerous duels, and started calling himself the Chevalier de Seingalt. He came up with the name by drawing cards with letters on them, one after another, at random. A high-stakes gambler, he once reportedly lost the equivalent of a million dollars (in today’s numbers) in a single night.

  Arrested and jailed repeatedly, Casanova returned to Venice as a broken man. Some biographers blame a teenage prostitute named Marianne de Charpillion, who squandered his money and smashed his spirit. In a feeble stab at revenge, he bought a parrot and taught it to say a single sentence, “Charpillion is a greater whore than her mother!” before reselling it in the market.

  For a while Casanova worked as an informer for the Venetian secret police, but a pamphlet he wrote, a vicious satire of Venice’s leading citizens, provoked such a scandal that he had to flee again. Wandering through Europe, he dabbled in poetry, theology, mathematics, and philosophy and wrote a history of Poland and a novel called Icosamero, one of the first books of science fiction. A charitable friend gave the penniless former philanderer a sinecure as the librarian in his dreary castle in Bohemia, where the servants taunted him with humiliating pranks, such as placing his portrait in the household privy.

  In the end, all that Casanova had left were words. He began writing his memoirs in 1790, eight years before his death, and kept revising drafts. “I am writing My Life to laugh at myself, and I am succeeding,” he said. A biographer described his unfinished autobiography as a virtual substitute for his lonely, unlivable life in exile.

  “Aren’t there any Italian love stories with happy endings?” I asked my friends after reading of Casanova’s dismal denouement. Most puzzled over the question for some minutes before naming the most obvious—the great Italian novel. I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) by Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873) is the book Italians most love to hate. “School ruins it for us,” a friend explains. “We have to read and study it so much that we can’t enjoy it.”

  I couldn’t hide behind the same excuse, but I didn’t relish tackling the Italian version of one of Victor Hugo’s turgid romantic works (especially after my friend added that there’s practically no sex). But the introduction to the novel piqued my interest in the author, known in the Milanese dialect as Don Lizander. His mother, Giulia, was the headstrong daughter of an esteemed penal reformer, Cesare Bonesana, Marchese di Beccaria, whose On Crimes and Punishment, published in 1764, ignited a campaign against capital punishment throughout Europe.

  At nineteen, Giulia—“a very beautiful, healthy, intelligent girl with a strong character,” as Natalia Ginzburg describes her in The Manzoni Family—fell in love with a totally unsuitable suitor, the playboy Giovanni Verri, the feckless brother of one of her father’s oldest friends. In addition to his reputation as a womanizer, the younger Verri was a Knight of the Cross of Malta and held a quasi-military, quasi-religious rank that forbade marriage at pain of loss of both prestige and income. The families hastily married Giulia off to Don Pietro Manzoni, a forty-six-year-old widower, count, and religious conservative. When Giulia gave birth to Alessandro three years later, gossips whispered about his paternity, but Don Manzoni fully acknowledged him as his son.

  That was about the extent of the parental attention the boy received. First shuttled off to a milk nurse, Alessandro was later sent to a long string of boarding schools commencing at age five, each one—in his memory—more wretched than the last. Giulia, who never wrote or visited, moved to Paris to live with a wealthy merchant banker named Carlo Imbonati. Her son, bouncing from school to school, was almost written off as a dunce, until he discovered poetry as a teenager. Then his imagination and scholarship caught fire.

  When Manzoni was twenty, his mother’s paramour invited him to Paris but died suddenly before his arrival. As his heir, Giulia acquired enough money to assure her and her son’s financial well-being. Mother and son formed a tight, affectionate bond and settled happily into a diverting life in the intellectual circles of Paris. Giulia even helped her son find a suitable bride—Enrichetta Blondel, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a Swiss businessman. A Protestant minister married the Calvinist bride and the fiercely anticlerical groom.

  However, both began to rethink their religious views. When their first daughter was born, the Manzonis agonized over whether to baptize her as a Catholic or a Protestant. At her father’s insistence, she received a Catholic christening. Over the next few years, both her parents converted wholeheartedly to Catholicism. In 1810, a priest remarried the devout Catholics, who eventually took up permanent residence in Milan. After twenty-five years of marriage, Enrichetta, mother of eight surviving children (of twelve births), died. In 1837 Manzoni married Teresa Borri, a count’s widow.

  Forsaking poetry, Manzoni became intrigued by a seventeenth-century agrarian edict designed to prevent marriages among the lower classes. What better subject for a romantic novel, he thought, than a tale of thwarted love among two poor but pure souls, played out against the background of turbulent political times and culminating with an outbreak of the plague?

  This, in an elevator pitch, is the story of I promessi sposi, set in and near Milan in 1628. The lustful village squire, Don Rodrigo, bets his cousin that he will seduce the heroine (Lucia) and forbids the cowardly local priest, Don Abbondio, to marry her and the stalwart Renzo. When the young couple, protected by a good friar (Padre Cristoforo), seek refuge elsewhere, Rodrigo has Lucia abducted by the powerful Innominato (Unnamed One) and the friar sent to a distant convent. After a religious crisis, Innominato finds God and frees Lucia. Then the plague breaks out, separating the lovers once more before they finally reunite, settle down, and live happily ever after.

  Manzoni, who e
xpressed himself best in Milanese and considered French, not Italian, his second language, asked his Italian friends’ help with his first draft. After gathering their suggestions into an “untidy heap of paper,” he rewrote it from scratch. I promessi sposi, published in three volumes between 1825 and 1827, received critical acclaim but didn’t attract many readers—largely because its antiquated language bore little resemblance to the way Italians actually spoke.

  “I envy the French,” Manzoni reportedly lamented. They at least could use a language actually spoken and understood throughout their nation. But this deeply neurotic author, whose agoraphobia (although it wasn’t identified as such) prevented him from going outdoors alone, didn’t give up. Like so many great Italian writers before him, Manzoni went looking for a language to write a story of love and fell in love with the language of Florence. In mid-1827 he took up residence in Dante’s hometown as he revised—page by page, paragraph by paragraph, word by word—his entire novel.

  Manzoni’s characters’ names pop up regularly in contemporary conversations as shorthand for certain Italian types. For a while, I thought all of my friends had the same priest, the pliable Don Abbondio, as their pastor and that unscrupulous politicians happened to be named Rodrigo. No name may better suit a spewer of bureacratic gobbledygook than that of the corrupt lawyer, Azzeccagarbugli, a combination of the words for “guessing” and “confusion.” But Manzoni’s influence might have gone no deeper if not for an unsung literary heroine.

  “Sempre l’uomo avanti e la donna dietro” (“Always the man in front and the woman behind”), Cristina, my Italian tutor in Florence, told me as I struggled through the classic. The woman behind Manzoni’s masterpiece was not an editor or linguist but Emilia Luti, a Tuscan governess. At Florence’s Società Dante Alighieri, Cristina and I turned the pages of a copy of the annotated manuscript of I promessi sposi, with Manzoni’s questions scribbled in the margins.