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

by Dianne Hales

  Early scriptwriters (sceneggiatori) for Italian films had to struggle to find a level of Italian that most people could understand. “They found the solution in the fotoromanzi or picture magazines that covered the new stars of cinema,” says Angelucci, who teaches film at the University of Carrara. The writing, geared for the widest possible audience, aimed neither too high nor too low. But government censors restricted what moviegoers could hear in a theater. No actors ever swore, lapsed into dialect, substituted an r for a d (as Neapolitans do), or pronounced a c like an h (as Tuscans do). And Italian movie directors, then and now, never cried, “Action!” but the onomatopoeic “Ciak!”

  The seven hundred movies produced under Fascism included several filoni, or genres. Heavy-handed propaganda films exalted Italy’s valiant fighting forces. Grand-scale sword-and-sandal epics, called “peplum” films, from the Latin for a Roman robe of state, recreated the glorious conquests of ancient legions. Their writers and directors were derisively called “calligraphers” because they copied themes from history or literature rather than dealing with contemporary issues. Some critics went even further and described the movies as “cadavers.”

  The people’s favorites were bubbly fantasies known as telefoni bianchi (white telephone) films that presented a glamorous fantasy world so rich and rarified that even telephones made a style statement. The smoothest, suavest matinee idol of all was Vittorio De Sica (1902–1974). Born in Naples, the handsome youth worked as an office clerk to support his family, but joined a stage company in his teens and quickly won audiences’ hearts. His acting career turned out to be a mere prelude to his later accomplishments as a screenwriter and director.

  By the time the grandiose promises of Fascism imploded in 1943, Italians had lost all faith in words, and filmmakers had lost funding, equipment, and studios. But after decades of suppression, Italy found its voice. A generation of movie talents burst onto the world stage with such explosive power that they created what Peter Bondanella, author of Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present, the first English-language history of Italian film, describes as “the greatest art form of twentieth-century Italy.”

  I knew nothing about these movies until I started studying Italian. “There are two shortcuts to speaking the language,” one of my early teachers told me. “You can take an Italian lover, or you can watch Italian movies.” I wisely chose the latter, although the stark black-and-white “neorealistic” films that I viewed week after week turned out to be almost as wrenching as an emotional entanglement.

  These movies, produced from 1945 to 1952, were revolutionary, with no heroes, no happy endings, no Hollywood stardust, and often no professional actors. Directors and scriptwriters, ammucchiati (heaped together), as they put it, collaborated like artisans in a Renaissance bottega (workshop). With unflinching, often excruciating honesty, they recounted the stories Italians were telling one another about their bitter struggles for survival through dictatorship, occupation, war, and devastation.

  “If you have any doubt about the power of movies to interact with life and restore the soul, study neorealistic films,” the director Martin Scorsese urges in his film tribute to Italian cinema, My Voyage to Italy. “They forced the rest of the world to look at Italians and see their humanity. To me, this was the most precious moment in movie history.”

  Neorealism was “reality transported into the realm of poetry,” said De Sica, who won international acclaim for directing raw and powerful dramas. Many consider the movement’s true father to be his writing partner Cesare Zavattini (1902–1989), known as Za, a prolific screenwriter who contributed to more than one hundred movies in his long career. So closely did he and De Sica work together that, Za observed, the collaboration resembled a caffelatte—a seamless blend.

  After studying law and working as a journalist and editor, Za began writing for film and, clandestinely, for the comic strips, including Topolino (Mickey Mouse) and Zorro, in the 1930s. Finally freed from Fascist cinematic shackles in 1943, Za articulated the fundamental theory behind neorealism: “There must be no gap between life and what is on the screen.”

  The first neorealistic classic, Roberto Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City), released in 1945, broke down the distinctions between life and art, feature film and documentary. Rossellini (1906–1977) had grown up watching movies every day in Rome’s first film theater, which his father built and owned. Rossellini worked as a sound maker and on other technical aspects of filmmaking before directing.

  The movie’s writers, including the young Federico Fellini (who called Rossellini “the great father, like Adam, who created us all”), drew on their own chilling experiences and actual events, such as the execution of a partisan priest and the savage machine-gunning of a pregnant woman chasing soldiers who had arrested her husband. Its plot focuses on a few dramatic episodes in the lives of several ordinary people: The priest Don Pietro joins with a partisan leader named Manfredi to fight the Nazis. Manfredi’s former mistress Marina eventually betrays him to the evil Gestapo officer Major Bergmann. Francesco, a friend of Manfredi’s, is engaged to a working-class woman named Nina, who is killed when she runs after the officers taking him away.

  In a film seminar at ItaLingua Institute in San Francisco, my daughter, Julia, and I, watching the scene of Nina’s brutal, senseless death, held hands and bit our lips to keep from crying. It didn’t work, particularly when we heard Don Pietro’s words before he faced a firing squad: “It’s not hard to die well. It’s hard to live well.” With Roma, città aperta, an American critic observed, Italy regained the nobility it had lost under Mussolini.

  Zavattini and De Sica collaborated on twenty-five movies, including several classics of neorealism. With no money to hire professional actors, they plucked men, women, and children from the thousands of destitute refugees camped in makeshift shacks at Cinecittà after the war. De Sica described this practice as “an advantage, not a handicap. The man in the street, particularly if he is directed by someone who is himself an actor, is raw material that can be molded at will.”

  As screenwriter (with Za) and director of Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief) in 1948, De Sica molded the performances of the two nonprofessionals who played the parts of the unemployed father, Antonio Ricci, and his son Bruno, into true cinematic poetry. The Hollywood producer David Selznick had offered to finance the film if De Sica cast Cary Grant in the leading role. De Sica declined. He deliberately made his selections, he explained, because of the expressiveness of the faces of the two unknowns and particular mannerisms in the way they walked.

  In the film, Ricci, unemployed for years, finally gets a job posting billboards, but he must use a bicycle to get around Rome. On his first day, a thief steals his bike, and Ricci and Bruno search frantically for it. After consulting a fortune-teller, Ricci finds the thief but does not succeed in reclaiming his bike. In desperation, Ricci attempts to steal a bicycle from the street but is immediately spotted, chased down, and humiliated by an angry mob in front of his terrified son. The movie ends with the son taking his father’s hand as they blend into a crowd.

  Ladri di biciclette, like De Sica and Za’s previous neorealistic masterpiece Sciuscià (Shoe-Shine), won a special Academy Award, and the two movies provided the impetus for the creation of an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Critics and film historians, who laud the film as one of the greatest ever made, have mulled over the meaning and profundity of it for decades. Italian critics find parallels to Dante’s Divine Comedy, since the action takes place between a Friday and Sunday and Ricci travels into an unexpected hell. The brand name of his bicycle, Fides (Latin for Faith), is deliberately ironic, yet the father does find redemption of a sort in his son’s love.

  I had never been able to view a copy of De Sica and Za’s Umberto D., released in 1952, in the United States, even though it too is considered one of the masterpieces of Italian cinema. So I spent a rainy afternoon in Rome watching a DVD on a small screen in a cubicle of the fil
m library at Casa del Cinema. I had read that Umberto D. was De Sica’s favorite film, dedicated to his father, Umberto, and starring another unknown, Carlo Battisti, a dignified linguistics professor from Florence whom he’d spotted on the street.

  In the black-and-white film, a retired government clerk, living in a bleak rented room with his dog, Flik, struggles to survive on his meager pension. The proud, acerbic pensioner panhandles, pleads for more time to pay the rent, searches frantically for his lost beloved pet, and finally, driven to despair, stands on the tracks before an oncoming train. At the last moment, Flik, rescued from the city pound, jumps out of his arms, and Umberto chases after him. The movie ends with an understated but heartbreaking scene of the old man coaxing a wary Flik to play with him.

  Church and state officials decried the film’s relentlessly grim pessimism, and distribution was limited. Like most of the ninety or so neorealistic films, Umberto D.—the last of the genre—did poorly at the Italian box office. “These movies were more popular abroad than at home,” says Bondanella, who notes that the most successful, Roma, città aperta, caught on first in France and then in the United States before attracting huge Italian audiences.

  The neorealistic movies did more than help Italy come to terms with a terrible time in its history; they gave dialects back to Italians. Rossellini’s 1946 film, Paisà, followed the Allies’ advance up the Italian peninusla from Sicily in six episodes, each reflecting a different local dialect. Luchino Visconti’s stark La terra trema (The Earth Trembles), shot in 1948 with actual Sicilian fishermen speaking and singing in their dialect, was unintelligible on the Italian mainland and had to be given an Italian voice-over.

  Some film critics protested what they called “dialect aggression,” but the use of regional idioms became a highly effective cinematic flourish. In 1964 the iconoclastic writer and moviemaker Pier Paolo Pasolini fleshed out the characters in Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Matthew, since the atheist Pasolini was uncomfortable with calling Matthew a saint) by means of accents and dialects. The dialogue is primarily taken directly from the gospel because Pasolini felt that “images could never reach the poetic heights of the text.” The disciples speak with a southern Italian accent, the high priest Caiphas talks like a Tuscan, and Salome, the seductress who served up John the Baptist’s head on a platter, chirps like a little servant girl from the Veneto. Jesus Christ sounds like the ultimate doppiatore, with a polished, nonidentifiable theatrical accent that, as one critic put it, “for Italians, is rather out of this world.”

  Pasolini soon found that he no longer needed to mix in dialects to make his movies sound real, because something new had happened. “L’italiano è finalmente nato!” (“Italian is finally born!”) he declared, describing it as the flat speech of postwar technocrats and bureaucrats—thin, bloodless, well suited to what he saw as a squalid capitalist society. “I do not like it,” Pasolini declared, although others cheered that for the first time in its history, Italy had a national spoken language, not just a literary idiom used by a minority of its citizens.

  Federico Fellini (1920–1993) influenced the vocabulary of both film and Italy. The most famous of Italian directors communicated to the world in a highly personal visual language, but also coined new words in the process. Born in the seaside town of Rimini, this son of a traveling salesman ran away to join the circus at age ten. (His job was caring for a sick zebra.) During World War II, he traveled throughout Italy writing sketches for a touring theater troupe.

  After the war Fellini set up a store called the Funny-Face Shop, where he sketched caricatures for American GIs. He also penned gags for comedians, illustrated comic books, and drafted radio plays. Working with Rossellini, he contributed to the scripts for Roma, città aperta and Paisà. These experiences, Fellini said, taught him that making movies was “the medium of expression most congenial…to my laziness, my ignorance, my curiosity about life, my inquisitiveness, my desire to see everything and to be independent, my lack of discipline, and my capacity for real sacrifice.”

  Fellini, a gifted artist who sketched many of his ideas for scripts, invented words that remain in use today. I Vitelloni, the title of one of his first films, literally means “big overgrown calves” but became a derogatory description of layabouts or aimless young men. Paparazzi, the plural of the name with which he baptized an aggressive photographer in La dolce vita (The Sweet Life), is the universal word for celebrity-chasing photo hounds.

  The title of the first Fellini movie I ever saw, Amarcord, a semibiographical coming-of-age tale of a year in the life of Rimini, Fellini’s hometown, comes from the local dialect word for “I remember.” To its natives, amarcord conveys a touch of poignancy, as well as the sound of a magical incantation like “abracadabra.” One of the women Fellini remembers most fondly is La Gradisca, the town’s scandalous beauty, the first to get a permanent wave and wear false eyelashes. She acquired her nickname for the night she spent in the company of a visiting prince of royal blood. Stripping naked before him, she courteously offered her body with the word “Gradisca!” (“May it please you!”). I think of her whenever an Italian inquires, “Gradisce qualcosa?,” a polite way of asking if I’d like something to eat or drink.

  Fellini described himself as “un bugiardo,” a liar—but an honest one. Fellini won eight Oscar nominations for screen-writing in addition to a raft of awards for directing. “The script is like the suitcase you carry with you,” he once commented, “but you buy a lot of things along the way.”

  According to his collaborator Angelucci, who contributed to the screenplays for Amarcord, L’Intervista (The Interview), and E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On), an homage to an opera singer and to opera that is my favorite of his films, Fellini “always had great respect for words, but faces were the critical part of the language of his films.”

  To construct a movie’s “human landscape,” Fellini considered five to six thousand faces. “They would suggest to me the behavior of my characters, their personalities, and even some narrative sections of the film,” he once said, explaining that he wanted “faces which immediately say everything by themselves as soon as they appear on the screen.”

  For his breakthrough movie of Rome during the 1950s, Fellini searched for the face of an everyman to play Marcello Rubini, a jaded, perpetually horny (arrapato, in Roman dialect) gossip reporter chasing scoops—and skirts—on the sultry Via Veneto. The producer, eager for a surefire success, wanted Paul Newman, but Fellini chose a rising but not well known star named Marcello Mastroianni (1924–1996).

  “The first thing Fellini said to me was ‘I need a face with no personality—like yours,’” Mastroianni later recalled. “That humiliated me, but I asked to see the script anyway.” What he got was a batch of blank sheets, except for one, “a drawing of a man in the sea with a prick that reached all the way down to the sea floor. All around his prick, like in an Esther Williams film, were sirens swimming and smiling. I turned red and green and a lot of other colors in my embarrassment. … Then I said, ‘Okay, it’s interesting. I’ll do it.’”

  The movie—with a working title of “Although Life Is Brutal and Terrible, You Can Always Find a Few Wonderful Moments of Sensuality and Sweetness”—evolved into La dolce vita, a vivid panorama of the not-always-sweet life of postwar Rome. Fellini researched it by hanging out with the paparazzi, “getting them to tell me the tricks of their trade … waiting in ambush for hours, thrilling escapes, dramatic chases.” One evening when he took a group out to dinner, they plied him with ever wilder tales until one of the veterans said, “Stop inventing, you idiots, you’re talking to an old hand at the game.” Fellini’s comment: “I didn’t know whether to take it as a compliment or an insult.”

  The movie was primarily shot in English, with only Mastroianni speaking his lines in Italian. “The words were the least of it,” the actor said. “What was important was the language of the film itself.” Some critics compared this 165-minute movie, with 104 separat
e scenes, to Dante’s Inferno. Like the fourteenth-century pilgrim, the errant journalist wanders through a corrupt world teeming with memorable characters—120 named in the script—to emerge into the light of day. But Fellini’s voyager finds neither radiant stars nor any hope of salvation.

  Fellini’s most controversial and financially successful film, La dolce vita enchanted the world with its unforgettable scenes, such as Anita Ekberg’s nocturnal dip in the Trevi Fountain, its signature music, and its luscious leading man. The American press crowned Mastroianni the ultimate “Latin lover,” and the poor boy from an industrial town south of Rome spent the rest of his career defying this characterization on screen while living up to it off screen. Married for more than four decades to Flora Carabella, mother of his Italian daughter (as he put it), he lived for years with Catherine Deneuve, mother of his French daughter, and carried on often tempestuous affairs with Faye Dunaway and other leading ladies.

  Mastroianni insisted that he’d always hated his looks. As a scrawny kid in hand-me-downs so short that his arms hung out from the sleeves, he was teased as “Skinny Paws.” Idolizing American actors such as Gary Cooper and Clark Gable, the starstruck fourteen-year-old earned ten lire as an extra in a grape-harvesting scene in a film shot at Cinecittà—a fortune to him at the time—plus all the grapes he could eat. Mastroianni badgered a friend of his mother’s to introduce him to her brother, the great Vittorio De Sica.

  “Study, study, study!” De Sica insisted. “Get your degree, and then we’ll see.” Years later, after decades of working together, often with Sophia Loren as “the third leg of the triangle,” Mastroianni still couldn’t bring himself to use the informal tu form of “you” with the cinematic titan he considered his professional zio, or uncle.