by Dianne Hales
Dante didn’t reserve a spot in hell for the foulmouthed, but a famous puttana, Thais, appears—“filthy, with tangled hair”—among the flatterers, while he rails against corrupt popes for puttaneggiar, whoring it up, with earthly kings. A milder profanity intrudes into the Purgatorio when Dante, lamenting Italy’s fate, calls his native land “no queen of provinces but of bordellos.”
The second of Italian’s three crowns, Boccaccio, whose very name serves as a synonym for bawdiness, sometimes seemed inspired by the devil himself. In the first story of the third day in his Decameron, he introduces Masetto, a fine lad “of remarkably handsome physique and agreeable features.” This studly youth pretends to be a deaf-mute to persuade the abbess at a convent with eight lovely young nuns to take pity and hire him as a gardener. As the muscular hunk labors, the nuns, thinking he can’t hear, tease him with the foulest language imaginable.
One day one of the nuns confides to another—within earshot of Masetto—that the dimwitted, deaf, and dumb gardener might be the perfect person to help them find out if it is true that other pleasures pale compare to being with a man. Masetto responds to their overtures with big imbecilic grins and gladly satisfies their curiosity—and then their enthusiastic appetites. As the other young nuns catch on, all demand shares of “the dumb fellow’s riding ability.” After she comes across Masetto lying in the sun one day, his clothes “undone from recent exertions,” the aroused abbess enlists him into her service.
Finally Masetto, unable to cope with the constant sexual demands, breaks his silence and says to the abbess, “Whereas a single cock is quite sufficient for ten hens, ten men are hard put to satisfy one woman, and yet here am I with nine of them on my plate.” The abbess is doubly shocked that Masetto can speak and that he is having sex with all her young charges. Rather than send him away to spread stories, she arranges for him to become steward and to divide his natural talents among the not-so-good sisters “in such a way that he could do them all justice.” After fathering a brood of “nunlets” and “monklets,” Masetto retires as an elderly and prosperous father “spared the bother of feeding his children and the expense of their upbringing.”
Boccaccio, at least in his lusty youth, would have fit right in with the humanist writers of the succeeding centuries. “The Italian man of the Renaissance,” as one contemporary historian put it, “reasons more with his phallus than his spirit.” The humanists brought their delight in sensual expression to the language, transforming their joy in life and love into verse and prose, some quite smutty.
The Renaissance was “il secolo d’oro della parolaccia” (“the golden century of bad language”), says Tartamella. It was certainly the most phallo centric of times. Although I’d visited and revisited the famous nudes in Florence’s museums many times, it wasn’t until my college-age daughter accompanied me last summer that I realized that we were always looking up or straight at the male member. (Much to my embarrassment, I learned in a conversation class that il membro is not always used interchangeably, like its English counterpart, for someone in a social group [socio]. A fellow student further informed me that the diminutive membrolino is the surest way to shrink an Italian man’s ego, not to mention other body parts, whereas membroso elicits the opposite effect.)
The penis unquestionably inspired Florence’s entire roster of artists and artisans. The archives of L’Accademia della Crusca, the bastion of the Italian language, contain verses from the canti carnascialeschi, the bawdy ditties the Florentines sang in the streets at Carnevale and during the two-month celebration of San Giovanni, their patron saint. Many of the tunes—canti priapei (priapic songs)—praise their composers’ strumenti sessuali. As they paraded through the streets, the different guilds touted the praises of their “merchandise” with words from the jargon of their trades, such as “brush,” “spinner,” “wood,” “iron,” and “club.”
The same enthusiastic appreciation inspired Pacifico Massimo, governor of Ascoli, a declared bisexual, and infamous libertine, to pen an essay called “Sul suo cazzo,” “On His Dick.” His narrator laments, “Misero me. My dick is so big and of such heavy weight that among people I would pass for having three legs.” On the other hand, he also exults, “Io godo contemplando la mia mastodontica colonna” (“I enjoy contemplating my mastodon of a column”).
That master of all arts, Leonardo da Vinci, shared his contemplations in a more scientific essay called “About the Penis”:
This confers with the human intelligence and sometimes has intelligence of itself, and although the will of the man desires to stimulate it, it remains obstinate and takes its own course, and moving sometimes of itself without license or thought by the man, whether he is sleeping or waking, it does what it desires. Often the man is asleep and it is awake, and many times the man is awake and it is asleep. Many times the man wishes it to practice and it does not wish to, many times it wishes to and the man forbids it. It seems, therefore, that this creature has often life and intelligence separate from man, and it would appear that the man is in the wrong in being ashamed to give it a name or exhibit it, seeking rather constantly to cover and conceal what he ought to adorn and display with ceremony as one deserves.
Pietro Aretino, father of modern pornography, would certainly have agreed. In the first erotic book written in any Western vernacular, a world-weary old courtesan named Nanna declaims at considerable length on the obscene things women do in their three roles: as nuns, wives, and prostitutes (who come off best). Although the tales are Boccaccian in nature, they are far coarser, featuring dildos made of Murano glass, group sex, and obscene murals. All the men crave sex only for physical release; women, only for money or greed.
The Aretine age ended abruptly in 1557 when the Inquisition published the Index of Prohibited Books, a list of books (including his) judged dangerous because they were immoral, obscene, or contained heresy, errors of theology, or vulgarity. Anyone who owned a prohibited book at home risked excommunication. Its thirty-second (and last) edition, published in 1948, contained four thousand titles, including authors such as Balzac, Sartre, Casanova, Sade, Hugo, and Flaubert. The Index itself was abolished only in 1966.
I always wondered what happened to these forbidden volumes. Were they burned or destroyed? “No,” Tartamella tells me. “The Inquisition actually ended up protecting and preserving the very books it banned.” The volumes, including priceless manuscripts dating back to the fourteenth century, remain to this day in la biblioteca dei censori, the library of the censors, one of the most important collections of the Vatican Library. Scholars refer to it as L’Inferno.
In the centuries of foreign rule, the Italians cultivated their skill at dire pepe, or “talking pepper” by lacing a conversation with sarcasm, puns, vulgarities, and scabrous allusions. This form of entertainment, still popular today, also served as the sole safe outlet for emotions too dangerous to release in other ways.
After unification, in the almost puritanical atmosphere of the late nineteenth century, purely pornographic literature blossomed. These crude books and magazines were mainly anonymous tales, written without style and often combined with obscene illustrations. Titles such as Il trionfo del culo (The Triumph of the Ass) capture the level of the writing. Gone were the erudition, wit, and humor that had accompanied licentious literature in the past. However, these grace notes survived in Italy’s long tradition of oral word duels, well laced with bestemmie and parolacce.
One of the best of the young verbal jousters of his day was none other than Benito Mussolini (1883–1945), who prided himself on his skill in sbandierare le bestemmie (clever and ostentatious swearing) and his audacity in challenging the religious establishment. In his book Mussolini com’era (Mussolini as He Was), Cesare Rossi recounts a blasphemous confrontation between the future duce and a priest in Switzerland in 1902.
“If God exists,” Mussolini declared, “I give him five minutes to strike with a lightning bolt the enemy who speaks of him.” Looking at his watch, Musso
lini counted down the seconds and said, “See? I am still living. Therefore, God does not exist.” Mussolini changed his mind and his language when he came to power. Under the Italian Codice Rocco of 1930, vulgarity and blasphemy became crimes.
Of course, Italians didn’t stop swearing; they just found new ways to do so. Many adopted fregarsene (literally “to give oneself a rub”), coined by the writer Gabriele D’Annunzio. Me ne frego—ubiquitous today—stood in for “I don’t give a damn” (or a stronger expletive).
Others made clever word substitutes, such as per Diana! instead of per Dio and porca vacca! (damn cow) instead of porca puttana (damn whore). A son of a bitch (figlio di puttana) became the son of a good woman (figlio di buona donna). Instead of vaffanculo, an angry Italian told someone to go lay an egg (va affa’ l’ovo!) or go to that country (va a quel paese), meaning hell.
With Fascism’s fall, Italians unleashed decades of pent-up parolacce. Friends recall hearing saintly grandmothers and dignified teachers spewing vulgar phrases in public and private. But despite free speech in the streets, the influence of the church and government preserved media censorship for decades. The director Vittorio De Sica dared to insert a vulgarity into his neorealistic classic Umberto D. in 1952. “Siamo tra uomini, dica pure, dica pure, puttane,” says the impoverished protagonist, commenting that since they are among men, he and his friends can use the word “whores.” Not at the time. Such words were snipped from Italian movies until 1988.
The regulations that best exemplify the absurd extremism of Italy’s language police were the Norme di autodisciplina per le trasmissioni televisive (Rules of Self-Discipline for Televised Transmissions), guidelines developed with Vatican input for state television. As Menico Caroli recounts in the book Proibitissimo, words such as alcova (alcove), sudore (sweat), vizio (vice), and verginità (virginity) could not be spoken. Thigh (la coscia) was allowed, but only in reference to a part of a chicken. Divorzio, prohibited as a vulgarity, was paraphrased as scioglimento del vincolo coniugale (dissolution of the conjugal bond).
Even words that sounded somewhat like parolacce were banned, such as cazzotto (punch) for its root (cazzo, or “prick”) and magnifica (magnificent) for its ending (fica, or “fig”—slang for “vagina”). Cornea, the part of the eye, could not be spoken because the very sound might conjure up the vulgar horns of a betrayed cornuto. Times have certainly changed. These days a single episode of Il Grande Fratello (Italy’s Big Brother) averages fifty parolacce.
Meanwhile politicians have made one parolaccia—coglione (literally “testicle,” but generally translated as “loser” or “fool”)—into a household and headline word. It started in 1986 when a journalist in an interview told the former prime minister Bettino Craxi that the socialists wanted to autoaffondare (self-sabotage) their own government coalition. “Whoever says that is a coglione,” Craxi commented. When the reporter noted that his source was Renato Altissimo, head of the liberal party, Craxi punned that then he was an “altissimo coglione” (highest-level idiot). In 1992 Umberto Bossi charged that a political enemy “would like to hold me by the balls [coglioni], like he has Berlusconi by his testicles. But mine don’t stay in his hand.” “Le mie non gli stanno in mano”—presumably because they are too big.
In 2007 Silvio Berlusconi, campaigning for reelection, described Italians in an opposing party as coglioni. With the expletive as their national slogan, Berlusconi bashers created a blog called sonouncoglione.com and showed up at rallies with signs and T-shirts declaring “Siamo coglioni!” With the controversy raging, a dictionary publisher made a heartfelt public plea: “Basta volgarità e parolacce! Impariamo ad insultare con garbo!” “Stop vulgarity and bad words. Let’s learn to insult with grace and style.”
I agree. But nonetheless, I felt I should find an all-purpose, nonoffensive, not-really-smutty parolaccia to keep in my linguistic quiver, just in case. I couldn’t just look for this one-size-fits-all expletive, of course; I had to listen for it. And so I did—in coffee bars, on bus lines, in shops, on trains, in banks, on television, in the mouths of everyone from magistrates to maids. The word I found—cafone, the three syllables of which are pronounced caw-fo-nay—traditionally meant a peasant or bumpkin.
My etymological dictionary traces its history back to Cafo or Cafonis, a centurion of Mark Antony, mentioned several times by Cicero, although it adds the more plebian (and probable) root of cavare, for someone who cava, or works the land. Its linguistic pedigree includes a debut in Italian literature in 1861, the very year of Italian unification, in a publication called La perseveranza (Perseverance). Best of all, cafone can mutate into the son of an ignorant bumpkin (figlio d’un cafone), a crude slob (cafone rozzo), a tasteless boob (cafone sciocco), an ill-mannered fool (cafone maleducato), an officious ass (cafone impertinente), a tasteless jerk (cafone senza gusto), or a disgusting boor (cafone ripugnante).
Confronted by any of these loathsome varieties, you might ask, “Ma Lei cafone ci è nato, o ci è diventato?” (“Were you born a cafone or did you become one?”)
I have used my chosen pseudo parolaccia exactly once. I had gone to a free concert commemorating April 21, Rome’s official birthday, at the city’s opera house. The mainly elderly Romans, dressed smartly (as their generation always does), were already seated when a pudgy foreigner in cargo shorts and short-sleeved shirt squeezed into our row to take the empty seat next to mine.
“Please don’t let him be American,” I prayed, but as soon as I heard his string of “Excuse me’s,” I knew he was. Just as he sat down, he erupted into a volcanic sneeze. Obviously lacking a handkerchief, he blotted his nose with the back of one hand and then wiped it dry on his hairy thigh.
The appalled woman on my other side and I locked eyes and almost simultaneously mouthed the same words, “Che cafone!”
THE EARLIEST ROMANS, LEGEND TELLS US, FOUND a human skull on one of the hills of their new settlement. They took it as a sign that Rome would one day become the Caput Mundi (“head of the world” in Latin). From caput came the hill’s Latin name Capitolium and the Italian Capitolino, roots of the English word “capitol.” No other piece of Roman real estate remains more sacred or more steeped in history. The temple of Jupiter, god of light and sky and protector of the state, built in 509 B.C. and almost as large as the Parthenon in Athens, hallowed this site. The Temple of Juno Moneta (Juno the Admonisher) housed the Roman mint, and moneta became synonymous with “money.” The kings of Rome honored their family gods here—and hurled traitors to their death from its heights. To placate his deities, Julius Caesar once ascended this hill on his knees.
After the sack of Rome in 1527, the muddy, devastated Capitoline became known as “goat hill.” To restore its former glory, Michelangelo designed the Piazza del Campidoglio, one of the most graceful urban spaces in the world, for the seat of Rome’s government. Atop his monumental staircase a bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius on horseback surveys the city. As long as this figure of the Roman emperor stands, an old saying goes, Rome will endure. Its citizens shrug at such superstitious nonsense, but when the ancient equestrian started showing signs of erosion, they substituted a copy and whisked the original inside the Capitoline Museum.
On a misty September morning I stand on the Campidoglio and contemplate the glory that was Rome. In The Tongues of Italy, the linguist Ernst Pulgram observes that the Romans and their descendants “thrice ruled the Western world in three different domains of human endeavor: once in government and law, once in religion, and once in art.” To this trio of triumphs, he added a fourth—in language.
I have come to an event that both honors and testifies to this conquest: the biannual conference of the Società Dante Alighieri, founded at the Campidoglio in 1890 by the poet Giosuè Carducci (1835–1907), the first Italian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. La Dante, as the society is called, teaches Italian to more than 200,000 students in more than seventy-five countries around the globe.
“It is only fitting that we are here in the
most important place in Greco-Roman civilization,” says Ambassador Bruno Bottai, president of La Dante, as he welcomes hundreds of the society’s members, instructors, and students. Each holds a scroll printed with La Dante’s original mission statement, a rallying cry to every Italian, “whatever his religious faith is, whatever his political opinions are”: “tutelare e diffondere la lingua e la cultura italiane nel mondo … alimentando tra gli stranieri l’amore e il culto per la civiltà italiana”—“to teach and defend the Italian language and culture in the world…nourishing among foreigners love and respect for Italian civilization.”
At the time of La Dante’s formation, Italy itself was barely clinging together. The provinces of Trentino-Alto Adige and Friuli-Venezia Giulia remained under Austrian rule (they joined the Italian state after World War I). The new nation, beset by ineradicable poverty, was hemorrhaging citizens; more than ten million Italians emigrated between 1870 and 1920. La Dante’s first objective was to use language to maintain their ties to their homeland; its ongoing mission is to create a global community of innamorati della lingua, lovers of the language.
La Dante has succeeded to an extent its literary founders could never have imagined. I wonder how many mother tongues are represented in the assemblage of Italianophiles from Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Oceania. As I chat amiably with attendees from various continents a rather astounding realization hits me: We all, regardless of nationality or ethnicity, are communicating with each other in what is essentially the fourteenth-century Tuscan dialect that Dante, peering down from a pedestal in the grand Sala della Protomoteca del Campidoglio, also would have understood.