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:

"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.