Becoming Italian Word by Word

Cooking under the Tuscan Sun

Il ricettario de “Il sole della Toscana”

The Tuscan Sun Cookbook 

Some people win you over with "hello"; some books, with an irresistible cover or title.  Frances Mayes had me with one spell-binding sentence about the choreography of the kitchen (la coreografia della cucina). The moment I read it, I wondered how it would sound in Italian. With the help of my invaluable colleague Valentina Medda, here is the translation: 

*I peel (io che sbuccio)

*you scrape (tu che gratti)

*wine spills (vino che si rovescia)

*bag splits (borsa che si rompe)

*beans simmer (fagioli che cuociono a fuoco lento)

*sink slurps (lavello che inghiotte l’acqua avidamente)

*petals fall (petali che cadono)

*flour drifts (farina che scivola)

*crust splits (crosta che si spacca)

*aromas spread (aromi che si diffondono)

*lights flicker (luci che sfarfallano)

*chocolate melts (cioccolato che si scioglie)

*glass shatters (vetro che va in frantumi)

*sauce thickens (salsa che si addensa)

*finger bleeds (dito che sanguina)

*cheese ripens (formaggio che matura)

*crumbs fall (briciole che cadono)

*sweat drips (sudore che cola)

*spoon bangs (cucchiaio che sbatte)

*meat glistens (carne che brilla)

*oil spatters (olio che schizza)

*wine breathes (vino che respira)

*garlic smashes (aglio che si schiaccia)

*lettuces float (lattughe che galleggiano)

*silver shines (argento che brilla)

*apron snags (grembiule che si impiglia)

*you sneeze (tu che starnutisci)

*I sing 'oh, my love, my darling' (io che canto ‘oh, amore mio, tesoro mio’)

*and dough rises (e pasta che lievita ) in soft moons the size of my cupped hand (in morbide lune, delle dimensioni della mia mano a coppa),

*as planet earth tilts us toward dinner (mentre il pianeta Terra ci inclina verso la cena).

The Tuscan Sun Cookbook: Recipes from our Italian Kitchen, by Frances and Edward Mayes, celebrates the soul- and appetite-satisfying essence of la cucina povera (the poor kitchen) of rural Tuscany. If you could  capture the sweet and savory joys of Italian food and friendship in a book, this sumptuous volume would be it. It delights the eye, tickles the taste buds and warms the soul. 

More of a buona forchetta (hearty eater) than a cook, I found the words as mouth-watering as the dishes, including such savory ones as:

*scottadito: finger-burners, small grilled lamb chops you eat with your fingers

*stagionata/o: seasoned, used for cheeses aged about a year until hard and flaky; semi-stagionata/o, aged for three or four months

*sformato: unformed, sort of a quiche without a crust (or form)

*pomarola: tomato sauce. Cans of Italian tomatoes are pelati.

*pasta asciutta / pastasciutta: dry pasta that comes in dozens of tongue-pleasing forms, such as mezze maniche (short sleeves), radiatori (radiators), strozzapreti (priest stranglers), stellette (little stars), orecchiette (little ears), penne (pens), vermicelli (little worms), linguine (little tongues), farfalle (butterflies) and cavatappi (corkscrews).

Another essential lesson: The abbreviations “q.b.” or “q.s.” in Italian recipes stand for quanto basta and quantum sufficit (whatever’s enough) -- something Tuscans always seem to know.

Click here for a sample recipe and below for a virtual visit to the Mayes’ kitchen:

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

Be My Valentine in the Italian Language

 

il tuo Valentino

your Valentine

On every February 15, the ancient Romans would celebrate a fertility festival called the Lupercalia with the sacrifice of a goat in the sacred cave dedicated to Romulus and Remus, the city’s legendary founders. Priests sliced the goat’s hide into strips and dipped them in the sacrificial blood. Boys would run through the streets, gently slapping women with the goatskin strips to enhance their fertility in the coming year. 

Later in the day, all the young unmarried women in the city would place their names in a large urn.  Rome’s bachelors each selected a name and became that woman’s sexual partner for the year in a sort of trial union that often led to marriage.

As it grew in power in the centuries following the birth of Christ, the Catholic Church abolished this pagan practice. In its stead it created the most romantic of saints’ days on February 14 to honor a martyred Roman priest named Valentino.  Although historical accounts differ, Valentino seems to have served in Rome in the third century A.D., when the Emperor Claudius II outlawed marriage for young men because he believed that bachelors made better soldiers. Valentino, sympathetic to young lovers, defied the decree and continued to perform weddings. 

Arrested and tortured, the tender-hearted priest developed a friendship with a young girl—perhaps his jailor’s daughter—who came to visit him. Some say they fell in love; others claim that he cured her blindness. Before being beheaded, the priest sent her a note that he signed, “il tuo Valentino.”  Lovers around the world have been using the same phrase ever since.

On Valentine’s Day, which has not been as commercialized in Italy as in the United States, Italian couples celebrate with dinner out, flowers, or the famous Baci Perugina, small, chocolate-covered hazelnuts wrapped with a poetic quote in four languages.

However you celebrate this happy day, I wish  you and your sweetheart a buona festa degli innamorati!   

Sweet Sayings for Your Valentine  

Mi sto innamorando di te -- I’m falling in love with you 

Sei l'amore della mia vita -- You are the love of my life 

Ti amo da impazzire/morire/alla follia -- I love you to go crazy, to die, to madness 

Sono pazzo di te -- I’m crazy about you 

Ti adoro -– I adore you

Voglio soltanto te –- I want only you

Sei l'amore della mia vita –- You are the love of my life

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

Click below to hear a perfect song for lovers: "Ho voglio di te" (I want you):

Giving Thanks in the Italian Language

Thank you

Italians don’t observe the all-American holiday of thanksgiving (la festa del ringraziamento). There are Italian words, but no cultural equivalents for the Pilgrim fathers (padri pellegrini) and the American Indians (Amerindi) who came together to celebrate the harvest (il raccolto) in the new world (il Nuovo Mondo). Italians do eat turkey (tacchino) and pumpkin (zucca) but not in the traditional way (modo tradizionale) that Americans prepare them on Thanksgiving.

At this time of expressing gratitudine, I would like to thank (ringraziare) all of you -- more than 450,000 -- who have visited my website, followed my blog, or read La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language. 

And so I say  grazie (thanks), grazie infinite (endless thanks), grazie mille (thanks a thousand, literally, but it translates as thanks a million), molte grazie (thank you very much), and grazie di cuore (thanks from the heart).

Italian appreciation (like everything else) becomes more effusive on paper. If you are writing a lettera di ringraziamento (a thank-you letter) for a gift, a meal, or a kindness, you might use phrases such as: 

*Non so come ringraziarLa -- I don’t know how to thank you (formal) 

*Grazie per la squisita ospitalità -- thank you for your exquisite hospitality 

*Grazie infinite per la Sua (formal)/ tua (informal) gentilezza -- thank you for your kindness 

*La ringrazio per tutto quello che ha fatto per me -- thank you for all that you have done for me (formal) 

*Il più affettuoso grazie per...la cena, il regalo, ecc -- most affectionate thanks for…the dinner, the gift, etc. 

*Le porgo i miei più sentiti ringraziamenti -- I profer to you my most heartfelt thanks (formal) 

*Non trovo parole per dirLe quanto ci ha fatto piacere -- I cannot find the words to tell you how much pleasure it gave me 

So what do you say when someone thanks you? Here are some options: 

*Prego -- please, not at all, comparable to "you're welcome"

*Di niente -- It’s nothing 

*Non c’è di che -- Not at all 

*Ma immaginati!  Ma figurati! -- That’s all right (literally, imagine or fancy that) –

*Non dirlo neanche -- Don’t even mention it 

*Non dire sciocchezze -- Don’t be silly (to friends) 

*È il minimo che potessi fare -- It is the least I can do 

*È stato un piacere -- It was a pleasure 

And then there's my husband's favorite: L'onore e tutto mio! -- The honor is all mine.

Words and Expressions 

ingraziarsi -- to curry favor 

grazie a Dio -- thank God 

Grazie, a buon rendere! -- Thank you, I owe you one! 

essere grato di –- to appreciate, to be grateful for

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

If I could show my appreciation in a song, this is the one I'd choose. You can find the lyrics on the youtube site. 

 

The Psychology of Italian Food

Una psicologa in cucina

A Psychologist in the Kitchen

When I met Carla Nuti years ago in Rome, I knew a smattering of Italian; she spoke no English. So we combined Italy’s two culinary arts: she cooked mouth-watering renditions of such classics as Roman-style gnocchi and artichokes, tagliatelle in meat sauce, veal scaloppine, and Neapolitan pastries. At her tavola imbandita (elegant table), I learned to eat like an Italian—not just with one's mouth, but with eyes and nose, heart and soul, brain and mind.

Carla has assembled a collection of her recipes in a new book, Una psicologa in cucina (A Psychologist in the Kitchen), available in Italian from Sovera Edizioni online and in bookstores in Italy. As a trained therapist, Carla offers insights into gli aspetti psicologici (the psychological aspects) of preparing and enjoying food, including:

*Confortante (comforting). When we are stressed or in a bad mood, we turn to un cibo gratificante (a gratifying food) like pasta that, beyond evoking pleasant memories, is ricco di carboidrati (rich in carbohydrates), a good source of serotonina, (serotonin), the neurotransmitter known as the “molecola della felicità’” (molecule of happiness).

*Simbolico (symbolic): Certain foods, based on their contesti socio-culturali (sociocultural contexts), are associated with particular emotions and experiences: il latte (milk) with il calore materno (maternal warmth), for example, and il cioccolato (chocolate) with romanticismo, lusso e ricompensa (romance, luxury and reward).

*Edonistico (hedonist): Eating involves il piacere di tutti i nostri sensi (the pleasure of all our senses). Even something as simple as un mandarino (a Mandarin orange) delights us with il suo colore (its color), the touch of la buccia (the rind) and the scent of il suo profumo (its perfume).

*Preferenziale (preferential): Men tend to favor sapori forti e decisi (strong and decisive flavors); women, foods that are soffici, delicati, facilmente digeribili, gradevoli alla vista e poco calorici (soft, delicate, easily digestible, pleasing to the eye and low in calories).

*Sessuale (sexual): Cibo e amore (food and love) have much in common, including l’appagamento di un desiderio (the satisfaction of a desire), la produzione di piacere (the production of pleasure) and la sopravvivenza della specie (the survival of the species).

*Afrodisiaco (aphrodisiac): Fiumi di parole (rivers of words) have been written to describe the provocative effects of certain foods, but nulla di scientifico (nothing scientific) has been proven. However, enjoying food has indirect effects by stimulating our creatività (creativity), volontà di sperimentarsi (wish to experiment) and desiderio di fare nuove esperienze (desire to have new experiences).

Just as she does at her table, Carla spices up every dish with bits of storia e curiosità (history and curiosity. For instance, we learn that Christopher Columbus brought back i fagioli bianchi (white beans) from the Americas and that the word ravioli comes from la famiglia Ravioli (the Ravioli family), proprietors of a 12th-century inn in Liguria that served a dish made of erbe, uova e formaggio di pecora (herbs, eggs and sheep cheese).

Carla’s final words to her readers are an exhortation: Scoperchiate le pentole e…liberate i vostri sogni. (Take the lids off your pots – and liberate your dreams!) But be forewarned: Carla’s dishes are so irresistible that they can prendere qualcuno per la gola (literally, take someone by the throat). 

Words and Expressions

cucinare –- to cook

libro di cucina –- cookbook

cucina casalinga -– home cooking

affogare i dispiaceri nel cibo –- to drown one’s sorrows in food

essere goloso di dolci / avere un debole per i dolci –- to have a sweet tooth

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. 

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.

Honoring the Father of the Italian Language

 

Dante 

Almost seven centuries after Dante's death in 1321, I accompanied the official delegation of Florence and the Accademia della Crusca (bastion of the Italian language)  to Ravenna to bring oil for the lamp above his tomb.  At the touching ceremony I came to understand more fully why Italy’s foremost national hero is not a king, general, or statesman, but a poet:

Born in 1265, Dante was christened Durante (yes, as in Jimmy) and exiled for his political views . During his bitter years of wandering the hostile countryside, he composed La Commedia (a publisher later added “Divina”), a literary tour-de-force that has never been equaled.

This medieval masterpiece consists of 14,233 eleven-syllable lines, organized into 100 rhymed cantos in three volumes: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.  Rejecting Latin as too elitist and regional dialects (including his native Tuscan) as inadequate, Dante fashioned a lustrous new vernacular to portray a fantastic universe that stretched from the depths of hell to the heights of heaven. A word that Dante concocted best describes how he wrote: sovramagnificentissimamente, “in a very, very, very magnificent way."

The tale begins in the year 1300, when Dante—or “the pilgrim,” as scholars refer to his first-person narrator--loses his way in a dark wood, travels deep into the earth, and enters a funnel-shaped hell with nine concentric circles spiraling down into an icy center.

In this abyss of darkness and fright, the pilgrim sees and mentions by name 128 sinners and converses with 37 of them, meets 30 monsters, takes two hair-raising boat rides, faints twice, and witnesses the damned being whipped, bitten, crucified, burned, butchered, deformed by repulsive diseases, transformed into shrubs and snakes, buried alive in flaming graves, skewered into rocky ground, frozen in ice, and immersed in mud, excrement, boiling blood, or pitch.

Just as compelling as the plot is Dante’s language. Intoxicated by words, he splashed his vast canvas with terms from every realm of human thought and experience. Homey terms like  mamma  and babbo (daddy) appear along with words from late and medieval Latin. Classical allusions and ornate phrases rub against coarse expletives. Scientific terms clash against the sounds of street and stable.

The power of this epic has never diminished.  In his memoir of imprisonment in the concentration camp at  Auschwitz in World War II,  the great Italian writer Primo Levi recalls reciting from memory a canto from the  Divina Commedia to a young man who wanted to learn  Italian. As he pronounced the poet’s words, Levi felt that he too was hearing them for the first time, “like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God.  For a moment I forgot who we were and where we were.”  Dante miraculously shone rays of beauty even into that  especially dismal ring of hell.

Words and Expressions

un inferno Dantesco –- a place of great suffering, pain and sorrow

bolgia infernale -- one of the “rotten pockets” Dante describes within the depths of hell; used for an especially unpleasant or chaotic situation

“amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona” -- Dante’s description of a love so strong, like that between the doomed lovers Paolo and Francesca, that it permits “no loved one not to love.”

“senza infamia e senza lode” – Dante’s description of those who cannot take a position or stand up for their beliefs; commonly used for someone or something that’s neither bad nor good, just plain mediocre. 

"Fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza" -- “You were not born to live as beasts, but to pursue virtue and learning.” With these words, Dante recounts, Ulysses rallied his comrades to sail into the unknown. Italians quote them to capture the essence of the human spirit.

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

Actor and dantista Roberto Benigni brings Dante's words to life:

Over the Moon in the Italian Language

la luna italiana

the Italian moon

“Che fai tu, luna, in ciel, dimmi, che fai?” the writer Giacomo Leopardi (1798 –1837) asked in one of his most famous poems. “What are you doing, moon, in the sky, tell me, what are you doing?” On June 15, the answer was clear: La luna piena (the full moon) was putting on a dazzling celestial show.

Un’eclissi lunare totale (a total lunar eclipse) occurs only when the sun, earth and moon are aligned exactly, or very closely so, with the earth in the middle. As the moon passes behind it, the earth blocks the sun's rays, and the moon disappears from the sky. In an eclissi parziale (partial eclipse), part of the moon remains illuminated.

The June 15 eclipse, visible over Europe, South America, Africa, Australia and most of Asia, was un raro fenomeno ottico (a rare optical phenomenon) because the center point of the earth’s shadow (l’ombra della Terra) passed across the moon. This made it the longest and darkest eclipse (l’eclissi più lunga e scura) of the century, lasting 100 minutes (cento minuti).

From our hillside perch in western Tuscany, we watched as the moon faded into blackness. Ever so slowly, thanks to the refraction of the rays of the sun (la rifrazione dei raggi solari), a red moon (luna rossa, a classic Italian sight) emerged. I couldn’t resist shouting an exuberant “Bravo!” to the heavens as a river of moonlight (chiaro di luna) widened over the Tyrhennian sea.

As in English, “eclipse” doubles as a verb as well as a noun, and “eclissare” generally translates as “to obscure or outshine another person.” But Italians also use the verb reflexively with a different twist of meaning: “Mi eclisso,” for instance, means “I disappear” or “I vanish.”

La luna -- which can be nuova (new), crescente (waxing) or calante (waning) -- doesn’t just appear in the night sky. Someone with extravagant wishes may chiedere la luna (asks for the moon). Italians refer to a fetus as being ancora nel mondo della luna (still in the world of the moon, or not yet born).

Some folks are so absentminded or detached from reality that they seem to vivere nel mondo della luna (live in the world of the moon) while others are so cranky that they avere la luna storta (have the crooked moon). In these hard times more people find themselves struggling to sbarcare il lunario (make ends meet).

An Italian lunatico may be temperamental but isn’t necessarily as wacky as an English lunatic. But do watch out for anyone who tries to fare vedere la luna nel pozzo (make you see the moon in a well). He’s just stringing you along. And you certainly don’t want to end up doing as the local dogs did during the eclipse: abbaiare alla luna (barking at the moon—or exerting yourself in vain).

Words and Expressions

Luna Rossa -- the name of the Italian sailing team that competes in international races such as the America’s Cup

lunario –- almanac

lunarista –- almanac maker, weather predictor

luna park –- amusement park

luna di miele –- honeymoon

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

For a song that captures the spirit of la luna rossa, click below: