by Dianne Hales
“What word should I use for ladder—scala or piolo?” he asks in a typical query. Time and again, Luti provides the Tuscan preference. When I promessi sposi was republished, again in three volumes, from 1840 to 1842, Manzoni presented Luti with a copy, adding a note of thanks for rewashing his “rags”—variously translated as cenci or panni—in the Arno.
These “rags” provided an entire new wardrobe for Italian. Although its basic plot involves a conventional love story, I promessi sposi—in the tradition begun with Dante’s Divina Commedia—is much more: a passionate, tender, richly textured ode to Italian and, as some saw it, a propaganda vehicle for an Italy that was “una d’arme, di lingua, d’altare, di memorie, di sangue e di cor” (“one in arms, language, worship, memories, blood, and heart”). Revered by his contemporaries, Manzoni became a hero of the new nation. He was honored as such at his death in 1873, with a state funeral attended by the royal princes and government chiefs and, a year later, with an even greater tribute, a stirring requiem from a fellow maestro, the composer Giuseppe Verdi.
Verdi himself scandalized his small town of Busseto when he lived openly with his mistress, the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi, for years before they quietly married. Italian, I discovered when I went looking for a term to describe her, has no word comparable to “mistress.” While the lady of a house is a padrona, the unmarried sexual partner of a man is called only an amante, or lover. A friend who had once told me about his father’s “other woman” recalls that his family referred to her as una di quelle (one of them). “They” were the women who dressed in flashier clothes, sported bigger jewels, ate out alone in elegant restaurants, and always seemed to laugh more loudly than mothers, aunts, sisters, teachers, and other “ladies.”
For centuries, Italy, like other Catholic countries, was filled with “them”—some famous as actresses or singers but all gossiped about and scrutinized. In an essay titled “The Italian Mistress,” the journalist Luigi Barzini focused on the crucial question about these women: At what moment did a lady—well spoken, well dressed, and well mannered—cease being a lady and become “one of them”?
A lady could have any number of lovers, one after another or all at the same time, he contended, without jeopardizing her social rank, but she would lose this status automatically the moment she accepted a too-precious gift. Anything that could readily be converted into a considerable amount of cash—a villa, jewelry, a thoroughbred horse, a valuable painting—could definitely cost a lady her reputation. So what could she receive with honor? The only acceptable gift, according to common consenus, was a book.
Yet for many years, mistresses were not merely tolerated but accepted as one of the “arrangements” of Italian marriages. Barzini recounts the story of a Milanese manufacturer whose mistress was almost young enough to be his granddaughter. His wife exploded in outrage on a gala evening at La Scala when she saw her rival, bedecked in ermine and diamonds, in a box. The husband, defending himself, argued that every man in a certain position had a mistress and pointed out his partner’s, seated a few boxes beyond his own. The wife peered through her opera glasses, then turned to her husband, and said, “What a choice! Vulgar, dressed in bad taste, loaded with cheap jewelry, and not pretty at all.” And she added with pride, “Ours is so much better.”
Margherita of the House of Savoy (1851–1926) didn’t always share this view. Even before their marriage, the crown prince Umberto, who would rule as Italy’s second king, had become enamored with a woman he spotted at a Carnevale ball. She turned out to be Duchess Eugenia Litta, then twenty-five and married to a rich Milanese nobleman. Their affair, which produced a cherished son who died in childhood, continued after his politically crucial marriage to his cousin Margherita. When she came upon La Litta in her husband’s bedroom, Margherita flounced off to old King Vittorio Emanuele and threatened to return to her family’s home.
“You would leave over such a little thing?” he famously replied. In 1878 Umberto ascended to the throne, Margherita at his side. His relationship with La Litta lasted for thirty-eight years, until an Italian anarchist from Paterson, New Jersey, assassinated the king in Monza on July 29, 1900. Despite her lifelong resentment, Margherita dispatched a courier to invite La Litta to bid her king and lover a private last farewell. Newspapers of the day praised this concession as a “noble gesture” worthy of a queen—and a touching example of bella figura.
Romantic gestures have never gone out of style. In Rome suitors who can’t carry a tune hire professional singers to serenade their sweethearts. Accompanied by accordion players, these crooners, dressed in white dinner jackets and cummerbunds, belt out traditional love songs over the roar of street traffic. The love-smitten swains stand at their side, gazing up at the girls who listen from windows and balconies.
A few years ago Ho voglia di te (I Want You) a bestselling novel that was made into a popular movie, inspired another form of romantic expression. The young hero convinced a potential girlfriend to reenact a fictitious legend: wrapping a lucchetto (padlock) with a chain around a lamppost on the Ponte Milvio, a bridge just north of Rome’s center, and throwing the key into the Tiber as a gesture of undying love.
So many couples began fastening locks and chains that the posts began to buckle under their weight. In 2007 city officials removed the lucchetti and set up designated steel pillars where lovers can now lock in their commitment without damaging the bridge itself. “Lucchettomania” has spread to Florence’s famous Ponte Vecchio and dozens of other bridges throughout Italy. If you can’t get to an Italian bridge, you can create your own lucchetto digitale and read messages (such as “Ti amissimo” or “Ti amooooooo!”) of other couples online at www.lucchettipontemilvio.com.
I began to appreciate the significance of such romantic gestures on my first trip to Italy—through a language lesson of sorts. On my last night in Venice, a full moon, as white as Carrara marble, glided above Santa Maria della Salute. A chilly north wind had blown the tourists back to their hotels. Shrouded gondolas rocked in the lagoon. A gentleman with a white goatee and a jaunty beret stopped where I stood on the quay.
“Che bella luna!” I pointed at the moon, proudly unfurling some of the words I’d acquired in my travels.
“Come Lei—anche Lei è bella!” (“Like you—also lovely. I pretended not to understand the compliment.”)
“Mi dispiace. Non parlo italiano.”
“Signorina, vorrebbe un bicchiere di vino?” (“Would you like a glass of wine?”) he asked, turning to face me.
“Mi dispiace, signore. Mi dispiace.”
“Stop telling what is not pleasing to you,” he said in a swift change to curt and lightly accented English.
“But I…”
“I know, I know. You don’t mean to be rude. But I see a beautiful young woman, and I think, ‘She should not be waiting alone for the moon to shine on her. She should be telling the moon to make her wishes come true.’ Tell me, do you know how to ask for what you want in Italian?”
“Voglio.”
“Beh! I want! I want! That is for babies. No, you must speak like a lady, like a princess. You must say, ‘It would be pleasing to me.’ Mi piacerebbe.”
“Mi piacerebbe,” I replied, rolling the r as he had.
“Sì! Sì! Ma che cosa Le piacerebbe? What is it you would like, bella donna della luna—lovely lady of the moon?”
“I don’t know. Non lo so.”
“Then you must find out. La vita vola: life flies. If you do not know what you want, you will never know where to look to find it.”
“I would like—mi piacerebbe—to speak Italian, parlare l’italiano.”
“Beh. That’s a start.”
“And you—e Lei? What is your wish?”
“Io? Sono invecchiato, ma ancora una volta mi piacerebbe baciare una bella donna alla luce della luna.”
“I don’t understand.”
He moved very close. “I’ve become old, but I would like one more time to kiss a beautiful woma
n in the moonlight.”
For several seconds I watched a river of silver moonlight shimmer on the canal. Then I did what it suddenly pleased me to do: I lifted my mouth to make his wish come true.
HE STROLLS WITH HIS HANDS IN HIS POCKETS, A long red scarf tossed loosely around his neck. His hair has turned white, but the familiar hint of a bemused smile plays at the corners of his mouth. The billboard-size image of Marcello Mastroianni, the biggest star in Italian film history, pulls me across Rome’s Borghese Gardens to the Casa del Cinema, the chic hub for Italian films and filmmakers. “This is Marcello’s place,” its publicist tells me, using the phrase “da Marcello,” as if it were his personal residence. “We want everyone who loves movies to feel at home here.” I certainly do.
The first classic I watch in its elegant auditorium is a 1954 romantic comedy called Pane, amore e gelosia (Bread, Love, and Jealousy). “Capisce?” (“Do you understand?”), a dapper gent of at least eighty next to me asks as the film begins. I can follow the basic froth of a story about a sexy and spirited girl (Gina Lollobrigida in first bloom), a handsome aging lothario (Vittorio De Sica, the iconic actor and director), and—here’s where I start losing the drift—a donkey. Without prompting, the man proceeds to repeat every line—in Italian, only slower and louder than the actors.
Although I didn’t realize it at the time, this was once a typical Italian moviegoing experience. When cinema muto—silent films—first appeared in the early twentieth century, most Italians spoke in dialect; many were illiterate. Italiano standard remained the language of the privileged, the politicians, and the priests.
“After the lights went down, people would call out, ‘Who can read Italian?’ and someone would shout out the titles,” recounts Professor Sergio Raffaelle (also dapper) of the University of Rome, a scholar of language in Italian cinema. “When talking pictures came out in 1930, theaters became schoolhouses. Millions of Italians learned how to speak the national language at the movies.”
That’s not all they learned. Cinema, with its lifelike immediacy and visceral impact, did for modern Italians what Dante had for his countrymen in the fourteenth century: It created a new way of hearing, speaking, seeing, thinking, and imagining life in this world and beyond. Movies—no less than Italy’s great works of literature, art, manners, music, and cuisine—taught Italians how to be Italian.
“In effect, the Divine Comedy was a film people played in their imagination centuries before cinema was invented,” says Gianfranco Angelucci, a screenwriter, director, and professor (and the coolest guy I know in Rome), who arrives for lunch at the Casa del Cinema café with a motorcycle helmet in hand and a lissome beauty with curly Botticelli tresses in tow.
His companion remains muta until I stumble through a question that requires some tricky Italian tenses. Then she breaks into a Mona Lisa smile that Leonardo, if alive today, would have zoomed in on rather than painted. “Leonardo invented the close-up,” says Angelucci. “The vocabulary of all the great Renaissance artists became the visual vocabulary of Italian films.”
Like their Renaissance counterparts, Italian filmmakers pioneered a new art form. In the 1890s, the father of Italian cinema, Filoteo Alberini, patented the cinetografo—a machine that recorded, developed, and projected films—then opened an ornate movie house (described as a temple of the new art) and a production studio in Rome. A few years later he invented the forerunner of all panoramic projectors.
The golden age of Italian cinema came early: 1909 to 1916, a period when Italian movies, mainly produced in Turin and Rome, captured and dominated the world market. Audiences flocked to see sprawling spectacles, filmed outdoors with huge casts, colossal battle scenes, and ever-more-astonishing special effects. Never again would Italian movies dominate the film industry. Since the end of World War I, the percentage of Italian films distributed within Italy has never risen above one-third of the total.
Early Italian movies both preceded and inspired Hollywood extravaganzas. Cabiria, a “sword and sandal” epic released in 1914, greatly influenced the American movie pioneer D. W. Griffith and created the model for spectacular scenes and larger-than-life movie heroes. Shot on location in the Alps, Sicily, and Tunisia, the multimillion-lira film amazed audiences with hand-tinted footage of Mount Etna erupting, the burning of the Roman fleet, and the march of Hannibal and his elephants.
Based very loosely on Cartagine in fiamme (Carthage in Flames) by the Italian adventure writer Emilio Salgari and Salammbô, a historical novel by Gustave Flaubert, Cabiria’s labyrinthine plot—with hyperbolic titles by Italy’s most infamous and flamboyant writer, Gabriele D’Annunzio—recounts a tangled blood-and-thunder tale set against the conflict between Rome and Carthage in the third century B.C. During these tumultuous times dastardly pirates kidnap Cabiria, a beautiful Roman maiden, and sell her as a slave to Carthage. Just as the pagan high priest is about to burn her alive in an evil sacrifice, a Roman nobleman and his muscular slave Maciste (think Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian) arrive to save the beauty and the day.
The original Maciste, a barrel-chested stevedore named Bartolomeo Pagano (1878–1947), was working on the docks in Genoa when the moviemakers recruited him to play the fearless giant. The overnight celebrity, who even changed his name to Maciste, starred in some fifteen sequels from 1915 to 1926 before others took over the role.
Mighty Maciste vanquished all comers—vampires, head-hunters, sheiks, cyclops, Zorro, Genghis Khan, and the Mongols. The plots typically featured a dastardly tyrant menacing the life and lovely limbs of a virtuous young woman. Belly dancers often made an appearance. And just in the nick of time, in what would become Hollywood tradition, Maciste employed his superhuman strength to protect the weak, rescue the imperiled, and vanquish the wicked.
If this sounds oddly familiar, it is. “Maciste,” according to D’Annunzio, derived from an ancient nickname for Hercules. Others have traced the name back to a combination of Greek and Latin words for “greatest” and “rock.” In my mind, this translates into “Rocky” and makes Maciste the great-great-grandfather of the Italian stallion Rocky Balboa—along with every other cinema action hero since.
In Rome I bought a DVD of Maciste, gladiatore di Sparta (Maciste, Spartan Gladiator), which may well be the cheesiest movie I’ve ever seen. But it reminded me of the equally overacted and underplotted films my dad used to take me to on Saturday afternoons. Hercules, Samson, and Sinbad all were Maciste clones, and his cinematic influence lives on in Superman, Hulk Hogan, Rambo, the Terminator, Iron Man, Batman, and the films of Jean-Claude Van Damme.
To Italians, Maciste was more than a celluloid demigod. In the early 1920s he gave them what they hungered for: a hero who could save them from danger and lead them to glory. Mussolini, the swaggering strongman who came to power in 1922 as the head of the black-shirted Fascists, promised to do the same.
Il Duce (the leader) was a film buff who called cinema “Italy’s greatest weapon” and started a national film school. The Fascist minister for press and propaganda (Mussolini’s son-in-law) encouraged university students to organize film clubs. The glittering Venice Film Festival debuted in 1934 as a showcase for the Italian film industry. In 1937, on April 21, the mythical anniversary of the founding of Rome, Mussolini inaugurated Cinecittà (Cinema City), Rome’s equivalent of Hollywood’s expansive studio back lots.
For all their enthusiasm for movies, the Fascists themselves produced not a single cinematic triumph. The regime’s greatest impact on movies and moviegoers was linguistic. As part of an utterly misguided campaign to purify Italian, Mussolini banned dialects, foreign words, blasphemies, and curses. The makers of silent movies dodged the directives of the language police by emphasizing visual impact over dialogue so viewers could intuit what was going on. Subtitles became increasingly telegraphic, and Italian actresses—film’s first dive (goddesses)—melodramatically batted their heavy-lidded eyes and sighed, sobbed, swooned, or lifted the back of their hands to their fevered brows. One
dared bare her breasts.
The Jazz Singer, which opened in Rome in 1929, brought sound to Italian movie theaters. But with the birth of the talkie—film parlato—in 1930, the age-old “question of the language” resurfaced. Which tongue should actors use for recitare (acting)? Italiano standard, precise, pure, and eloquently enunciated, was the government’s answer. Diction schools, originally set up to train radio announcers, churned out professional doppiatori (dubbers) for both foreign and homegrown films.
In Italian theaters international film stars such as Greta Garbo, Laurel and Hardy, Gary Cooper, and Mickey Mouse talked with “a Tuscan tongue in a Roman mouth”—classic Florentine pronounced with Rome’s more melodious accent. Even Pellerossa (American Indians—literally “redskins”) spoke refined Italian in deep, low voices. Movie titles also were translated into Italian: High Noon became Mezzogiorno di fuoco (Midday of Fire) and Gone with the Wind, Via col vento (Away with the Wind). In Italy, as everywhere else, Scarlett’s (Rossella in Italian) motto, “Domani è un altro giorno,” became a catchphrase of the day.
Since Italians still prefer hearing Italian to reading subtitles in foreign films, dubbing has remained a big business—with big stars of its own. When Luke Skywalker battled Darth Vader in the classic Star Wars films of the late 1970s, the voice Italians heard was not Mark Hamill’s but that of Claudio Capone (1952–2008), then a young, aspiring doppiatore. Over the next three decades, Capone supplied the voice for Hollywood actors such as John Travolta, Michael Douglas, John Malkovich, Alan Alda, Bill Murray, and Martin Sheen. On Italian television he dubbed Don Johnson in Miami Vice and Ron Moss, who plays heartthrob Ridge Forrester on The Bold and the Beautiful, the soap opera called “Beautiful” in Italy. When Moss himself visited Italy several years ago, his fans were crushed that he didn’t know the language they heard him “speak” almost every day.