Becoming Italian Word by Word

Inside the Italian Renaissance: Money and the Beauty It Bought

Denaro e Bellezza

Money and Beauty

“Do you know the most beautiful thing Florence ever created?” a historian asked during my recent stay. As I began to list the obvious candidates, he interrupted. “No,” he said firmly. “Il fiorino.”

The city first coined “Messer Fiorino,” with the image of its patron saint, John the Baptist, on one side and the Florentine lily on the other, in 1252. Containing precisely 3.53 grams of 24-carat gold, the tiny coin quickly became the currency of Europe. The founding families of the Florentine banks, which loaned millions of florins to popes and princes, turned into medieval Midases.

Their fortunes funded the greatest flowering of art that Western Civilization has ever known. A dazzling exhibit at Palazzo Strozzi -- Denaro e Bellezza: I banchieri, Botticelli e il rogo della vanità (Money and Beauty: Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities) -- weaves together Florence’s financial and creative evolution.  The bottom line: No bankers, no Renaissance.

Items such as ledgers, strongboxes, coffers, keys, purses and an abacus (an ancestor of the computer) convey the history of commercial trade (la storia degli scambi commerciali) and the birth of the banking system (la nascita del sistema bancario). For money lenders and exchangers, money  provided luxury and pleasure for life on earth. However,  it also threatened their souls with eternal damnation for sins such as as avarice and usury (avarizia e usura).

“Wealth was seen as bringing with it immorality, greed and degeneration,” says art historian Ludovica Sebregondi, the exhibit’s co-curator (with author Tim Parks). No such stigma attached when money was transformed into beauty. And so rich Florentines invested in works of art (opere d’arte) by Botticelli, Beato Angelico and other masters of the Renaissance.

Assembled from major museums and private collections from around the world, the hundred or so paintings and sculptures provide a true picture of the life and of the European economy (una vera fotografia della vita e dell'economia europea) from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.

The show spans the period from the mid-thirteenth century, when the florin was first coined, to the emergence of Savonarola, the monk who denounced those with “homes full of vanities, dishonest images and wicked books.” His influence on the artist Sandro Botticelli is seen in a series of works that range from radiant Madonnas to an alluring nude Venus to the stunning allegorical painting “The Calumny of Apelles” (In the poster above). Sebregondi describes it as “somewhat of a farewell to the Florence of Lorenzo the Magnificent.”

With Italy in the midst of an economic crisis that threatens the future of the euro, created to unite European currencies as the florin once did, the timely topic has attracted a great deal of international attention and acclaim.  The  exhibit continues until January 22, 2012.  Click here for information on times and tickets.

If you can’t get to Florence, the video below provides a wonderful overview—whether or not you can understand the Italian commentary.

 

Dianne Hales is the author of LA BELLA LINGUA: My Love Affair with Italian, the World's Most Enchanting Language. 

Top 10 Tips for Learning the Italian Language (Part 2)

i migliori consigli

the best tips

In my last post, I shared five of the strategies that helped me learn and love la bella lingua. The secret of the next five is having fun as you acquire a second tongue. 

6. Play. Word games in any language strengthen the brain and boost memory. In Italian giochi di parole, such as cruciverba (crosswords), enigmi (puzzles), and anagrammi (anagrams) add the extra bonus of building your vocabulary. You can buy inexpensive puzzle books at newsstands in Italy or play online.  Another fun option is playing the Italian versions of popular board games, such as Monopoly and Scarabeo (Scrabble), with friends or fellow students. Or you can ask an Italian to teach you card games such as Scopa and Briscola. (Just don’t bet any money on them.)

7. Mingle. Join a bocce team or a Vespa club. Watch a soccer match in an Italian bar or restaurant. Take cooking classes taught by Italians. Go to Italian street festivals. For informal opportunities to speak Italian, look for a local conversation group at www.meetup.com. Enroll in a class at schools, community centers, Italian cultural organizations -- or, best of all, in Italy.

8. Don’t be afraid of tripping over your tongue. “Sbagliando si impara,” Italians say. “You learn by making mistakes.” Focus on communicating, not speaking in diagram-able sentences. If you can’t think of the correct tense, just say the infinitive of a verb -- parlare for “speak”, for example -- or stick to the present tense. And by all means, use your hands. That’s molto italiano.

9. Spend time in Italy every day. If you don't have time or money for a trip abroad, bring a little Italy into your life. Drink an espresso. Eat some pasta. Have a gelato. Listen to a Puccini aria. Wear something Italian (shoes are a great choice). Visit the websites of ex-pats, happy wanderers, and travel bloggers.

10. Be swept away. I fell so madly, gladly, giddily in love with Italian that I spent years researching and writing La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language. The more you know about how Italian became Italian, civilized the Western world, and enriched every aspect of our culture and life, the more Italian you’ll want to know.

For something entirely different, sit in on an Italian class with Monty Python:

Top 10 Tips for Learning the Italian Language (Part 1)

 
 

 imparare l'italiano

learning Italian

Since the publication of LA BELLA LINGUA in 2009, many readers have written to tell me that they've been inspired to study Italian. Yet while Italian is easy to love, it can be hard to learn. In honor of the eleventh annual "Settimana della Lingua Italiana" (Italian Language Week), I am re-posting some secrets for acquiring l’italiano. Here are the first five, with five more to come in my next blog: 

1. Fill your ears. Modern Italian sprang from the volgare, the rough-and-ready street Latin of ancient Rome. Spoken for centuries before the vernacular was captured on paper, Italian remains a language for the ear. Listening primes the brain for understanding. I started listening to beginner Living Language CDs in my car years ago and drove my way through the entire series. You also can download podcasts to your iPod, MP3 player, or cell phone, and listen on planes, trains, buses, and places in between.

2. See it, say it, stick it. Train yourself to say the Italian word (if only to yourself) for things you look at every day: il cielo for sky, la sedia for chair; il pane for bread. (It’s always best to memorize the masculine or feminine article along with a word.) Put a post-it note with the Italian name on objects, such as il tavolo (table) or lo specchio (mirror), around the house. Don’t remove one until you’ve memorized the term.

3. Read. Go to onlinenewspapers.com  for a sampling of Italian language papers. Just scanning the headlines will give you a sense of common words and names in the news. Try to get your hands on Italian comics (seriously). If you’re young or young at heart, you’ll delight in the adventures of Topolino (Mickey Mouse). Italian action comics, with heroes such as Tex, a time-traveling cowboy, and the sauve jewel thief Diabolik, “king of terror,” provide a fun way to improve your vocabulary and reading skills.  

4. Watch. Movies allow you to see and hear Italian in action. Rent classics such as Roma, città aperta or La dolce vita. By all means, read the English subtitles but leave the sound on so you can absorb the rhythm of the language. Among the movies I watch time and again are: Fellini’s Amarcord and E la nave va, Il Postino, Pane e tulipani, and anything with Marcello Mastroianni, particularly the biography  "Si, mi ricordo" ("Yes, I Remember"), made by the woman who shared the last decades of his life.

5. Sing. Even if you can’t carry a tune, singing along with popular Italian songs can introduce you to everyday vocabulary and improve your pronunciation. At www.youtube.com you’ll find everything from charming ninnenanne (lullabies) such as Stella stellina to pop tunes like Volare (below) and famous operatic arias. 

Dianne Hales is the author of LA BELLA LINGUA: My Love Affair with Italian, the World's Most Enchanting Language. 

 

Celebrating Italian Language Week

 

Viva l'italiano! 

This week marks the eleventh annual "settimana della lingua italiana" (Italian language week), with the theme of "Buon compleanno, Italia" (Happy Birthday, Italy) in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of Italy's independence.  But centuries before there was an Italy, there was Italian.

Its roots date back  nearly 2,800 years  when a band of itinerant shepherds and farmers,  possibly led by the legendary Romulus, settled  on the hills above the Tiber.  Their utterances  evolved into the volgare (from the Latin sermo vulgaris, for the people’s common speech), the rough-and-ready spoken vernacular.  Scrappy street Latin, not the classical, cadenced rhetoric of Caesar and Cicero, gave rise to all the Romance languages, including Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian.

The first miracle of Italian is its survival. No government mandated its use. No mighty empire promoted it as an official language. No conquering armies or armadas trumpeted it to distant lands.  Brutally divided, invaded, and conquered, the Mediterranean peninsula remained a patchwork of dialects, often as different from each other as French from Spanish or English from Italian, for centuries. 

Italian as we know it was created, not born. With the same thunderbolt genius that would transform art in the Renaissance, writers of fourteenth-century Florence—Dante first and foremost—crafted the effervescent Tuscan vernacular into a language rich and powerful enough to sweep down from heaven and up from hell.  This priceless living legacy, no less than Petrarch’s poetry, Michelangelo’s sculptures, Verdi’s operas, Fellini’s movies, or Valentino’s dresses, is an artistic masterwork.

Through centuries of often-brutal foreign domination, words remained all that Italy’s people could claim as their own. “When a people has lost homeland and liberty, their language takes the place of a nation and of everything,” observed Luigi Settembrini, a nineteenth-century  Neapolitan “professor of eloquence” who dedicated his life to the language that came to define Western civilization.  

As a national spoken tongue, Italian is nuovissimo (very, very new). Rallying for one nation united by one language, Italians won their country’s independence in 1861. At the time four in five of its citizens were illiterate. Fewer than 10 percent spoke Italian exclusively or with greater ease than a local dialect. Word by word, generation by generation, village by village, the people of the peninsula became Italian speakers.

Ever-growing numbers of people around the world are trying to do the same. With only an estimated 60 to 63 million native speakers, Italian ranks 19th among the world’s most spoken tongues. Nonetheless it has become the fourth most-studied language (after English, Spanish and French).

Why do so many people want to study Italian? “I suspect it is because Italy and the Italian language are perceived as beautiful, fun, and sexy,” observed Stephen Brockman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, in an essay called “A Defense of European Languages,” adding, “And why not? I can’t see anything wrong with that.”

Neither do I. 

Only a beautiful, fun, sexy language could inspire a love song like La Nostra Lingua Italiana (Our Italian Language), written in 1993. Popular songwriter Riccardo Cocciante celebrates Italian as serene, sweet, welcoming, universal, generous,  and sensual, the language of everyone looking for un po’ d’amore (a little love).

 

Here is the first stanza, followed by a rough translation:

Lingua di marmo antico di una cattedrale
Lingua di spada e pianto di dolore
Lingua che chiama da una torre al mare
Lingua di mare che porta nuovi volti
Lingua di monti esposta a tutti i venti
Che parla di neve bianca agli aranceti
Lingua serena, dolce, ospitale
La nostra lingua italiana

"Language of ancient marble in a cathedral

Language of the sword and tears of sorrow

Language calling from a tower to the sea

Language of the sea that brings new faces

Language of the mountain exposed to all winds

that talks of white snow to the orange groves

Language serene,  sweet, welcoming 

Our Italian language."

Dianne Hales is the author of LA BELLA LINGUA, My Love Affair with Italian, the World's Most Enchanting Language. 

Remembering Steve Jobs in the Italian Language

Addio

Farewell

“We have lost a modern Leonardo,” a historian in Florence said to me a few days after the death of Steve Jobs. Similar expressions of praise and sorrow echoed through the Italian media and social networks in una grande manifestazione d'affetto universale (a great demonstration of universal affection).

Headlines described Jobs as il figlio dei fiori che reinventò 
il futuro (the flower child who reinvented the future), un visionario che ha cambiato il nostro modo di comunicare (a visionary who changed our way of communicating) and “il Kennedy della nostra generazione" (the Kennedy of our generation). Bloggers couldn’t resist quipping that Jobs had "volato in Cielo a disegnare l’iGod a Dio" (flown to heaven to design the iGod).

Some speculated on what might have happened “se Steve Jobs fosse nato in Italia” (if Steve Jobs had been born in Italy). The conclusion: Apple would never have existed—for reasons ranging from a lack of suburban garages like that of Jobs' parents (where Apple was conceived) to the endless red tape of Italy’s bureaucracy to a distaste for America’s (and Jobs’) Darwinian competitiveness.

“Apple,” unlike brands like Coca-Cola and Pepsi, could have been translated into Italian as “mela,” but it never was. Apple’s iconic products also retained their American names. When I made the mistake of using “eee,” the Italian pronounciation of the letter “i,” for “iPod” or “iPhone,” I was quickly corrected. “It’s ‘i’ for ‘io’ (I),” a friend said, perfectly summing up Jobs’ great contribution of making technology personal.

In a touching “arrivederci” to the “ingegnere dei sogni “ (engineer of dreams), the popular author and columnist Beppe Severgnini addressed Steve Jobs, the  "genio di senso pratico" (genius of common sense) whom he had long admired but never met, with the informal “tu.”

“Puoi andartene orgoglioso” (You can go out proud),” he wrote. “Hai cambiato il mondo che hai trovato, e questa è una buona maniera di vivere, per tutti.” (You have changed the world that you found, and this is a good way to live, for all of us.)

“Sei partito per un posto che nessuno conosce.“ (You have left for a place that no one knows), Severgnini added. “Se riesci a tirarci fuori un'app, mandacela giù: sarà celestiale.” (If you manage to pull out an app, send it down to us. It will be heavenly.)

Like Severgnini, I wrote my first book on a Mac, and I add my "grazie" to the millions of others who mourn "la perdita" (the loss) of a man who touched all our lives and left this enduring message:   Restate affamati, restate folli!  (Stay hungry, stay foolish!)

Dianne Hales is the author of LA BELLA LINGUA: My Love Affair with Italian, the World's Most Enchanting Language. 

Here is Jobs' famous Stanford commencement address with Italian subtitles:

"Chewing a little" of the Italian Language

 

masticare 

to chew 

Remember the last time you took a bite of crusty bread and started to chew (masticare)? Can you think of a word specifically for this sound?  I can’t—in English, that is. In Tuscany I have discovered many.

Edmondo De Amicis (1846 –1908), a famed Italian novelist, journalist, poet, and short-story writer, once compiled a list of words that Florentines of the time, in their quest for linguistic precision, used to convey the crunching of bread between the teeth: croccare, scricchiolare, scricchiare, cantare, sgrigiolare, crocchiare, sgretolare, scricciolare, sgrigliolare, stridere, scrogiolare and sgriechiolare. The intellectual and critic Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) coined the word “toscaneggiare” (to make Tuscan) to mock such pretentiousness. 

Although most of these words are no longer used (certainly not outside of Florence), you still want to masticare bene il cibo prima di ingoiarlo (chew food well before swallowing). And sometimes that means you have to masticare rumorosamente (chew noisily, chomp, crunch, munch). 

Biasciare, a tasty morsel of a word, means to munch or chew with the gums. A piece of bread or paper or anything else you chew and then spit out, nameless in English, is called a biascicotto or biasciotto in Italian. Biascicatura sounds exactly like what it is: mumbling, as do biascia or bava, both words for slobber. Avere la bava alla bocca means to foam at the mouth. 

An 18th-century Florentine writer defined the word berlingare as jabbering, chattering, or prattling on “when others have their gut full and their belly heated by wine…from this verb the Florentines  derive the names berlingaiuoli and berlingatori, which they call those who take delight in filling  their mouths, gobbling, and lapping.”  Florentines called the last Thursday of Carnevale (Fat Thursday in other regions) berlingaccio because “it seems that everyone is permitted to enjoy themselves, feasting and brawling, with gluttonous delights and delicacies.” 

Masticare also can translate as mutter, grumble, or ponder something (as in chewing it over). If you know just enough of a language like Italian to mangle it, you could say you masticare un poco di italiano. 

Some things are harder to chew—and swallow (ingoiare)—in any language. If you accept something very reluctantly and resentfully, you masticare amaro (chew bitter). Although you may not want to, at some point you might have to accept a grim reality and mandar giù un boccone amaro (send down, or swallow, a bitter pill). 

In certain circumstances you may even have to eat crow, which translates in Italian as ingoiare il rospo (eat the toad). 

Words and Expressions 

gomma da masticare -– chewing gum 

masticare qualcosa –- to mumble something 

biascicone, borbottatore –- mumbler 

deglutire –- to swallow 

Dianne Hales is the author of LA BELLA LINGUA: My Love Affair with Italian, the World's Most Enchanting Language.

Florence's Crowning Glory

Il Duomo

From my temporary home in Florence, the first thing I see in the morning and the last at night is its splendid cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, one of the most recognizable churches in the world. People often assume that “Il Duomo”—as it’s called—translates as “the dome.” But “duomo,” from the Latin domus for home, means house of God.

Florence’s town fathers decided to build a new cathedral in the last decades of the 13th century to accommodate the city’s surging population — and to surpass in size and grandeur the churches of rival city-states Siena and Pisa. It took the Florentines several centuries, a sizeable fortune and strokes of architectural genius to build this heavenly home--"a structure so immense,” a historian wrote in the 15th century, “so steeply rising toward the sky, that it covers all Tuscans with its shadow.”

Visible from miles away, Il Duomo stands out at the ultimate masterpiece in a city of masterpieces. Upon completion of its crowning cupola, the townspeople proudly began introducing themselves with the phrase, “Io son fiorentino del Cupolone” (“I am a Florentine of the Big Dome”). However, the basilica of “St. Mary of the Flower” (symbol of Florence) is grand in ways that go beyond sheer immensity.

The original façade was the collective design of several 16th-century artists, but the unfinished work was eventually dismantled. The exterior remained bare until the 1870s, when the current façade was constructed primarily of white marble from Carrara, green from Prato and pinkish red from Siena in a design that harmonized with the existing patterns of the Baptistery and Campanile.

The most striking impression upon entering the cathedral, the largest in Europe at the time of its completion, is its vastness. The two-aisled nave measures 502 feet in length and 295 feet in width. Designed to hold congregations as large as 20,000 people, the basilica can feel empty even with tour groups congregating at different meeting places. Many of the decorations, including works by Michelangelo and Donatello, are on display at the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo behind the cathedral.

The original design called for a cupola bigger than any the world had seen. But no one could figure out how to build it. For more than half a century rain and snow fell through a 143-foot hole in the ceiling. Finally Filippo Brunelleschi came up with a dome-within-a-dome plan based on the design of the Pantheon, the architectural wonder of ancient Rome.

Construction of Brunelleschi’s dome began in 1418 and continued until 1436. Time and again, faced with a seemingly insurmountable difficulty, Brunelleschi invented something entirely new: a hoist, a crane, even a way of installing stoves on the dome so his workers could eat well without wasting valuable time descending to the street. (He reportedly watered their wine to keep them sober.)

The dome, which weighs 37,000 tons, required some 4 million bricks. Built without a supporting wooden framework—unthinkable at the time—the construction inspired awe among the Florentines, who quoted a line from Dante’s Divine Comedy—de giro in giro, circle by circle—as they beheld its soul-stirring ascent into the Tuscan sky.

To appreciate just how big the dome is -- 142 feet in diameter, 300 feet high -- climb the 463 steps between its two vaults to the narrow gallery above the cathedral. Just avoid the dizzying mistake I made: Don’t look down.

The Machiavellian Italian Language

Niccolò Machiavelli

   A branch of the Machiavelli famil lived on the street where I am renting an apartment in Florence. They  surely never  guessed that their name would  penetrate  the global vocabulary as an international byword for  political cunning and pragmatism. Yet no one,  as T. S. Eliot observed, “was ever less Machiavellian than Machiavelli.” 

    After fourteen years as a civil servant and diplomat in the Florentine Republic, Niccolò Machiavelli was tried, tortured, and exiled  after the Medici reclaimed power.  Frustrated in his forced retirement to his modest country home, Machiavelli began work on Il Principe (The Prince) in the hope that a clear-eyed, no-nonsense tactical handbook would  display his political acumen and win him a government position. 

    His  dreams, personal and political, never materialized. He died—“of a surfeit of failure,” one historian stated—before the printing of his masterwork. But by analyzing affairs of state dispassionately, with logic and objectivity, Machiavelli put the science into political science. 

    Five centuries after Machiavelli’s time, The Prince still compels and shocks readers for two reasons: what its author says and how he says it. What if a prince acts so ruthlessly that he loses the adulation of his people?  Better to be feared than loved, shrugs Machiavelli. Since men are generally ungrateful, vacillating, cowardly, and greedy, he observes, they might promise their souls to a prince yet  desert or betray him because love is fickle, while fear is not.  Machiavelli never agonized over whether the ultimate end might justify any means.  He was sure it would.   

    Just as remarkable as The Prince’s unflinching pragmatism is its language. Considered by some the finest Italian stylist of the Cinquecento (1500s),  Machiavelli wrote in a clean, stiletto-sharp  vernacular that echoed the everyday speech of his fellow Florentines (including, in some of his more ribald works, their earthiness). 

    Machiavelli, whose satiric play The Mandrake is still revived and performed around the world,   couldn’t resist mocking the pretensions of some of his  newly prosperous countrymen.  In his own twist on bella and brutta figura, he recounts the story of a character named Castruccio.  A man from Lucca invites him to dinner at his house, which—thanks to a recent windfall--he has just remodeled in the most ostentatious manner possible. During the meal Castruccio suddenly spits in his host’s face. Rather than apologize, he explains that he did not know where else to spit without damaging something valuable.

    Shortly before his death, the heart-broken political strategist wrote to a friend,  “I love my country better than my very soul.”  His country, which ignored him in life, didn’t know quite what to say of him in death. His  monumental tomb in Florence's Santa Croce, the burial site for Italy’s titans of history, reads simply, “To so great a name, no epitaph can do justice.”

Words and Expressions

machiavellismo –- political cunning

machiavellico –- crafty

machiavellicamente –- in a crafty manner

vivere da principe –- to live like a prince

principesco -– princely, prince-like 

Dianne Hales is the author of LA BELLA LINGUA: My Love Affair with Italian, the World's Most Enchanting Language.