by Dianne Hales
After World War II, Mastroianni got his first big break as a member of Visconti’s theatrical company, but he yearned for a movie career. “I couldn’t understand what Shakespeare had to do with Gary Cooper,” he said. Quite a bit, it turned out.
Nature had endowed the fledgling actor with the bedroom eyes, sensuous lips, dimpled chin, and rueful smile that came to be known as “the Mastroianni look,” but his intensive theatrical training produced the Mastroianni sound. When he started acting, he was “a gawky lad who couldn’t even say a line,” Visconti recalls. In his stage roles, Mastroianni mastered a neutral italiano standard with just the faintest resonance of Rome. His voice—initially nasal and reedy—also acquired the timbre, projection, and cadences that gave it the lush quality film critics would describe as “mellifluous.”
Bit part by bit part, B movie by B movie, Mastroianni broke into the business. In 1960 La dolce vita rocketed him to the heights as the international symbol of Italian film, style, and sexiness. But afterward, he complained, directors mainly wanted him “to slither across the floor after women” in Latin-lover roles. Hollywood, whose offers he resisted for decades, suggested teaming him with Frank Sinatra in a tale of two Latin lovers. Instead, Mastroianni played against type—first as an impotent cuckold in Sicily, then as con man, drunk, lawyer, addict, patriarch, assassin, homosexual, rapist, magician, novelist, police commissioner, director, beekeeper, priest, union organizer, dancer, professor, Russian aristocrat, General Custer (in a French-Italian movie called Non toccare la donna bianca, or Don’t Touch the White Woman), Henry IV, and film’s first pregnant man.
In all, Mastroianni made a staggering 140 motion pictures, starring in about 90 percent of them. “No other actor in Europe or in the United States has worked and talked about his work as much as Marcello Mastroianni,” observes biographer Donald Dewey. “He has raged as much as murmured, sung and danced as deftly as [he] crooned sweet nothings, carried off acting awards and won three best actor Oscar nominations.”
Mastroianni scoffed at the earnest preparations of American actors and called moviemaking a game. “Acting is a pleasure, like making love,” he quipped to a reporter. “Correction: lovemaking can be an ordeal.” No one ever saw him studying a script, yet he always knew his lines.
“I read a script the whole thing through maybe twice or three times, then I put it aside,” he explained. “This character, this person that I am to become, starts to grow inside me, little by little. He begins to talk to me, and I listen like a primitif naïf. If I don’t listen, he will die in me. So I’m eating a plate of spaghetti, and I hear him. Then I stop somewhere, say at a traffic light, and there he is in the car next to me. My job is the character, not the lines per se. They always seem to come to me when we get down to shooting.”
How Mastroianni, who dubbed his own voice after the filming of his movies, said a line—even a single word—mattered as much as what he said. Take one of his most famous scenes, from the wildly popular Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, costarring Sophia Loren, directed by the indefatigable De Sica, and written by the neorealist pioneer Zavattini.
Sophia, as a worldly prostitute, lives next door to a seminarian who becomes so infatuated with her that he decides to stop his religious studies. His grandmother accuses Sophia of corrupting him, and she promises God at least temporary chastity if the young man returns to the seminary—as he does. When Marcello, one of her clients, shows up, she performs a titillating striptease that he responds to by howling like a wild beast. Then she remembers her vow and stops abruptly. Marcello squeaks “Cosa?” (“What?”) with such horrified incredulity that critics raved about his exquisitely droll—and exquisitely delivered—reaction.
Too young to appreciate or even be aware of Mastroianni in his prime, I had no idea that his was one of the most remarkable careers in film history. I’ve been making up for lost time by watching as many of his movies as I can rent, buy, or borrow. My friend Roberto in Rome offered yet another incentive: “No one speaks Italian more beautifully. Listen to Marcello, and you’ll sound more Italian.”
And so in the most minor of his many roles, Marcello has become my tutor. While I enjoy the company of his celluloid characters, I prefer Marcello in his own words. In a delightful cinematic autobiography, Mi ricordo, sì, io mi ricordo (I Remember, Yes, I Remember), filmed shortly before his death in 1996, by the woman who was his companion for the last decades of his life, Marcello talks of his childhood, his friends, his travels, his movies, his likes and dislikes.
“I believe in nature, in loves, in emotions, in friendships, in this marvelous landscape, in my work, in my companions,” he reflects. “I like people. I love life and perhaps for this I have been loved in return [he charmingly says riamato, literally “re-loved”] by life.”
On some nights when Bob isn’t home, I pop this DVD into my laptop and take Marcello to bed with me. Every time I listen to his velvety voice, I realize that even this homey experience captures some of the essence of Italian moviegoing: the magic of listening to wonderful stories in the dark.
“GOOD DAY, MADAME. YOU SEE I SPEAK THE ENGLISH,” said the courtly driver who picked me up at Rome’s train station. When he tried to back out of a postage-stamp-sized parking space, a matronly Italian woman, dripping jewelry, behind the wheel of a big Mercedes was blocking his way.
He rolled down the window and asked in his accented English. “Please, madame, could you move?” She stared right through him. He repeated the request in polite Italian. No response.
“Madame, I’m sure you are a very fine lady,” he said, reverting to English.
Without deigning to look at him, she replied in a single skewer of a word: “Vaffanculo!”
This is how I learned Italian’s equivalent of the F-word. The two Romans were just getting started. The driver let loose a volley of invective that practically sizzled in the air. She, color flooding her face, blasted back with equally fiery words, although all I could make out was an occasional stronzo (shit) and cazzo (prick). The driver spat out dark imprecations I recognized only as Romanesco, the local dialect. Turning to me, he explained, “She’s a big, fat, stupid idiot!” Then he started the engine and aimed for the Mercedes. Her mouth still moving, the woman backed up.
“Suina puttana,” he muttered under his breath. “Swine whore.” I didn’t know whether to blush or applaud.
I probably would feel the same way at the raucous celebrations of V-Day (for vaffanculo, not vittoria) that have drawn tens of thousands of Italians into city piazzas to protest government corruption and suppression of information. Rather than the classic V sign, the crowds wave their raised middle fingers and shout “Vaffanculo!” A generation ago it would have been shocking to hear this word in public; two generations ago under the Fascist regime it would have been a crime.
Yet though V-Day is a recent invention, the use of language, often vulgar, to shock the powerful and awe the masses continues a very old Italian tradition. V-Day’s thoroughly modern organizer, Beppe Grillo, a burly, bearded comedian and writer with a mane of unruly gray curls, has positioned himself as the voice of the people through a blog (beppegrillo.it) that ranks among the most widely read in Italy. However, to me he seems the twenty-first-century incarnation of Pietro Aretino, the Renaissance gadfly and “scourge of princes” who harnessed the power of la parolaccia (bad language) to grab attention.
Italians foul words haven’t changed much in the five centuries since. Cristina, my history tutor in Florence, shows me a copy of a sign from the 1600s posted by an angry customer on the door of a shop in Milan. It denounces the owners as a beccone (big cuckold) and his puttanissima (whore of whores) of a wife. These days disreputable expressions—including such downright nasty ones—pepper everyday conversations in parks and piazzas, on television, and in the movies. As we walk on the streets of San Francisco, an Italian friend, incensed at her boyfriend, unlooses a fusillade of epithets—bastardo, cretino, stronzo, idiota. When I try to hush her, she points out th
at no one understands what she’s saying. Passersby actually seem charmed by her vivacity.
“Well, you wouldn’t use such language on the streets of Rome,” I protest.
“Why not?” She shrugs her shoulders. “Everybody in Italy talks dirty these days.”
Maybe not everyone, but much of the population, from grade-schoolers to grandparents, seems to have mastered the art of bestemmiare come un turco (literally “swearing like a Turk,” the equivalent of a “trooper” in English). Parolacce have become so common, my Italian friends tell me, that they no longer sound offensive—except when foreigners toss around phrases like vecchia troia (old whore, a reference to Helen of Troy) or rompicoglione (ballbreaker) and sound like children mouthing words they don’t fully understand.
Yet it is importantissimo to learn le parolacce, one of my first teachers insisted. “You need to know that someone who says ’fica [fig] isn’t necessarily offering you a fruit,” she explained.
This slang word for female genitalia stems from the Tree of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden (which produced figs), a misogynistic way of reinforcing the medieval belief that women are evil temptresses. You certainly wouldn’t want to mistake lo zig-zag (intercourse) for a dance or scureggione (old fart) for a compliment. But don’t take it personally if a waiter mutters “Porca vita” which sounds vulgar, as he clears the table. He’s merely bemoaning his miserable life with this harmless equivalent of “Oh, damn.”
The ability to recognize Italian’s dirty words has spiced up one of my favorite activities in Italy: eavesdropping. Take cazzo, Italy’s most popular curse word, generally translated into “prick” or “dick” (as in testa di cazzo, or “dickhead”). But the Italian writer Italo Calvino insisted that no precise equivalent exists in any language. He’s right. I’ve heard Italians use it as an expression of surprise (cazzo!), praise (cazzuto), boredom (scazzo), anger (incazzato), approximation (a cazzo), or plain and simple contempt (cazzone). “Col cazzo che ci vado!” translates as, “The hell I’ll go!;” “Che cazzo vuoi?” as “What the f*** do you want?”
The same versatility applies to other Italian vulgarities. Though a shit remains ever so in English, a group of charming young Italian women once explained that in Italian a guy can be a big disgusting shit (stronzone), a small charming one (stronzino or stronzettino), a shit with something going for him (stronzetto), a disagreeable shit (stronzaccio), or a bad but irresistible shit (stronzuccio). A filthy place, in case you ever find yourself in one in Italy, is a stronzaio.
In addition to butt, bottom, or ass, culo can refer to surrendering the last bastion of dignity (dare anche il culo); the final or bottom part of something, such as a sack or glass (cul di sacco, culo di bicchiere); being as close to someone as a shirt on skin (essere culo e camicia); badly made (fatto col culo); deceiving someone (mettere nel culo); pulling one’s leg (prendere per il culo); not being able to move (because of a culo di pietra, or “ass of stone”); and having good luck (avere culo). The expression restare col culo per terra, which means to lose everything and be left with nothing, comes from medieval Lombardy, where prisoners had to lower their pantaloni and rest their bare buttocks on the grass to discourage escape attempts.
One insult that never seems to change is cornuto, the ancient term for cuckold, sometimes symbolized by a raised index and little finger. (If you’re from Texas, resist any temptation to flaunt this Longhorn hand cheer.) The word may have come from the masculine form of “goat” (capro or becco). Essere becco means the same as essere cornuto, from corno, for “horn of a goat,” a fickle animal that changes sex partners frequently.
Le bocche sporche (the dirty mouths) aren’t the only Italians who relish parolacce. A trattoria in Trastevere, originally called Osteria da Cencio for its owner Vincenzo (Cencio) De Santis, was rechristened La Parolaccia in 1951 because of its reputation as a place to hear stornelli sboccati—popular bawdy verses. An actor showed up one night with a group of friends dressed in black tie. The waiters called them penguins; they teased back. Soon other stars, such as Anna Magnani and Alberto Sordi, started dropping in to join the fun. Tourists are still doing the same.
La Parolaccia gained a national reputation in 1958 when la principessa triste, the sad princess Soraya, divorced by the shah of Persia because she couldn’t have children, came with a local prince (and a contingent of paparazzi) to pass a carefree evening. Newspaper headlines read “Soraya in un locale malfamato” (an infamous place). The name, if not the cheeky attitude, has traveled as far as Long Beach, California, where the local La Parolaccia advertises good food and wine in the sort of place where you don’t have to watch what you say.
Wondering what Vito Tartamella, the man who wrote the book on bad words, Parolacce, would have to say about language, I arranged to meet him in Milan at the offices of the magazine Focus, where he is a staff editor. The earnest young journalist struck me immediately as a freedom-fighter of sorts, with a shock of thick black curls, the combination of goatee and mustache that Italians call a pezzino (a little piece of hair), and a Garibaldi-red shirt.
The first word he teaches me sounds anything but dirty: turpiloquio, the formal term for foul language. “Civilization couldn’t exist without it,” Tartamella observes. “Obscenities were among the oldest, if not the oldest, words in human history. Instead of throwing rocks at each other, men learned to hurl insults and vulgarities.” In his meticulously documented book, Tartamella identifies 301 such parolacce. The Dizionario storico del lessico erotico italiano (Historic Dictionary of the Erotic Italian Lexicon), which includes antiquated and dialect terms, lists ten times as many—3,500 impudent entries.
“Do Italians curse more than other people?” I ask.
“They curse differently,” says Tartamella, noting that, unlike French, German, or English speakers, Italians express powerful emotions such as anger, disgust, surprise, and horror with sexual obscenities rather than scatalogical ones. They certainly have more of these expressions at their command. In the course of his scholarly research, Tartamella identified dozens of euphemisms for the sex organs.
Italians refer to male genitals as objects (tool, handle, mallet, hammer, club, telescope), weapons (cannon, pistol, nightstick), musical instruments (flute or fife), structures (bell tower or column), animals (fish, eel, bird), and foods (carrot, celery, asparagus, biscotto, salami, sausage, and leccalecca, “lick-lick,” for lollipop).
The lascivious lexicon for female genitals includes words for containers (bread box, stove, oven, trap), weapons (sheath or shield), musical instruments (guitar, bagpipe, castanet), places (nest, woods, bush, valley—and paradiso), animals (cat, sparrow, mouse, clam), plants and fruits (fig, flower bud, lily, rose, strawberry, prune), jewel, treasure, “her,” and sister. Multiplying all of these at least tenfold are dialect words, most from foods.
Le parolacce have served Italians well in war as well as love, Tartamella tells me, because Italian’s gruffer vulgarities pack a verbal punch. Their linguistic ingredients—the twinned zz in cazzo, the forceful double ff in vaffanculo, the triple consonants in stronzo—cause these words to explode out of the mouth. Their phonetic force actually helped the ancient Romans conquer the world.
According to historical accounts, before a battle, Roman legions would line up just a few yards away from their enemies and unleash a verbal artillery barrage, screaming vile insults and bloodcurdling threats. Intimidated by these savage cries, the enemy soldiers in the rear would often panic and flee. Soon enough the front line would do the same.
Unlike the anything-goes Greeks, the Romans felt a need to set some linguistic limits and invented censorship in the fifth century B.C. Originally censori (censors) had been charged with ascertaining the wealth of the citizenry, a crucial reckoning because different social and economic classes had different rights and obligations. In 443 B.C. these magistrates took on the extra duty of assuring the respect of public morals, although they objected less to foul language than to offensive satires.
&
nbsp; Censors didn’t seem to inhibit writers such as Catullus (84–54 B.C.), who trilled of passion in ecstatic odes to his beloved Lesbia. He also wrote the following blistering diatribe, translated by Peter D’Epiro, co-author of Sprezzatura: 50 Ways Italian Genius Shaped the World, when she betrayed him.
Hey, all you regulars of that pickup joint
nine pillars down from the Temple of the Twins.
Do you actually think you’re the only guys with
pricks,
with some sort of license to screw all the girls
while the rest of us schmucks have b.o.?
In the following century, The Satyricon by Gaius Petronius (A.D. 27–66) lived up to the double implications of its name: a satire, from satura for medley and satyr for a mythical creature with male human traits and animal ears and tail. The narrator’s name, Encolpius, means “in the fold,” or more explicitly “in the crotch.” He fights with his friend Ascyltos (Unwearied) over the affections of a boy named Giton (Neighbor) in language that ranges from extremely elegant to equally vulgar.
Vernacular Italian, taking wing in the Middle Ages, retained Latin vulgarities such as culo (ass) and merda (shit) but added new insults or spregiativi. The crusaders contributed pagano for “pagan” and infedele for “infidel;” city dwellers derided those who lived in the country as villani (peasants whose crude houses were considered inferior to urban palazzi). Religious phrases, such as for la croce, i piedi, il cuore, la vita, or la passione di Dio (“the cross,” “feet,” “heart,” “life,” or “passion of God”), turned profane in the mouths of blasphemers. “When a gambler loses his money and nerve,” a monk of the time observed, “he calms himself by chopping up Christ piece by piece.”
Vulgarity gained new status—higher or lower is a matter of debate—when the church deemed it a mortal sin. The most renowned prelate of his time, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), hailed as “the titan of theology,” declared that la bestemmia was graver than homicide because it sprang from the intention to attack the goodness and generosity (bontà) of God himself, whereas insults took from a man the honor due him and the respect that meant as much as house and home.