by Dianne Hales
But just like English words in Italian conversations, the building faded into the background, our eyes dazzled by visions of dresses, displayed as we’d never seen them before: on sleek, long-necked, faceless mannequins with their arms upraised, arranged into pyramids of red, mountains of white, and long chic rows of black. A bridal train cascaded down a sky-high pedestal like a waterfall. A jewel-toned harlequin design, surrounded by mirrors, shimmered like a kaleidoscope. The showstopping dresses worn by Oscar winners such as Julia Roberts and Sophia Loren appeared next to videos of their red carpet moments. In the middle of this finery stood the ancient altar, destroyed in the Dark Ages, partially excavated in the Renaissance, and painstakingly reconstructed over more than half a century. Its walls contain the most exquisite relief carvings in the world, portraying ancient Romans so vividly that you can’t help but smile at a child tugging at his father’s toga for attention.
Dazed by the double delights of ancient glory and modern style, Bob and I were strolling along the Tiber when a car pulled up and an Italian man asked directions. (This alone should have made us suspicious, since we don’t look like natives.) I could tell from his accent that he wasn’t a Romano. (Alarm bells should have been going off, because friends are always warning us that street-smart con men would snatch a bite from your pizza when you’re not looking.) He proceeded to tell us an entertaining, somewhat plausible tale of being in town for a trade show but having to get on the road to Padua for a family wedding.
“Take these as a gift,” he said, proffering samples of his firm’s jackets. Then it came: the ever-so-embarrassed confession that he’d run out of cash and needed money for gas. “Look!” he entreated. We could see for ourselves that his tank was empty. Bob and I glanced at each other. The chances were that we were being played. We knew it. He knew we knew it. But we took the jackets, which we gave to children in our apartment building, and gave him some gas money. Our friends were horrified that we had let ourselves fare fessi, or play the fools. Well, yes. But we’d appreciated his outrageous furbizia (trickery)—and, I admit, I’m a sucker for anything anyone tells me in Italian.
I’m not alone. Has any other language ever inspired a love song? In “La nostra lingua italiana” (Our Italian Language), written in 1993 and featured on YouTube, the songwriter Riccardo Cocciante celebrates Italian as serene, sweet, welcoming, universal, generous, and sensual, the language of the ancient marble of cathedrals, of boats and serenades at sea, of looks and smiles from afar, of palaces and fountains, of opera and the grand Italian cinema, the language always looking for un po’ d’amore (a little love).
L’amore, according to a recent Società Dante Alighieri poll, is the favorite word of Italians living in other countries; mamma comes in second. With so many beguiling possibilities to choose from, I could never select just one. But I do have a favorite phrase: Mi sento a mio agio. Although it doesn’t quite translate into English, it more or less means “I feel at home,” or “I’m at ease,” and it resonates at a deep level with Italians. The first time I said this to our hosts at Monte Vibiano Vecchio, we all got a little teary.
Over the last quarter-century, I’ve come to feel at home in Italy and in Italian. Yet, even after spending three months in Italy last year, I returned to San Francisco feeling I was still missing out on something, still not quite comprehending le cose italiane (Italian things). Italian may be the mother of all tongues, but at times I still feel like a stepchild.
“Certo,” Alessandra said when I described this sense of an Italy and an Italian I had not yet explored. “That’s the difference between learning Italian and living Italian.”
“Does that mean it can’t be learned?” I asked.
“Not at all,” she said, “but you have to learn differently.”
The next week she showed up with a deck of playing cards for a game called scopa, a CD of Milanese cabaret songs, a comic book about a Batman-like figure called Diabolik, an exvoto (a small heart-shaped painting of the Madonna bought to express gratitude to God for a favor granted), and La smorfia, a book for interpreting dreams by associating them with numbers and then betting the numbers in the Italian lottery.
“Cominciamo!” Alessandra said with a smile. “Let’s get started.”
Bibliography
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LA STORIA DELL’ARTE
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ON GOLDEN WINGS
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EATING ITALIAN
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——
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SO MANY WAYS TO SAY “I LOVE YOU”
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———. D’amor parlando. Palermo: Sellerio, 1992.
MARCELLO AND ME
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