Becoming Italian Word by Word

A Year of Italian Language and Culture: The Prince

 Il Principe 

Italy is commemorating the 500th anniversary of the writing of a classic work: Niccolò Machiavelli's Il Principe (The Prince). Although completed in 1513, the treatise by the man who "put the science into political science" wasn't published until 1532, five years after his death.

Machiavelli's name since penetrated the global vocabulary as an international byword for political cunning and pragmatism. However, 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 (1469-1527) was tried, tortured, and exiled after the Medici reclaimed power.

Frustrated in his forced retirement to his modest country home, Machiavelli began work on The Prince in the hope that a clear-eyed, no-nonsense tactical handbook would display his political acumen and win him a government position--a dream that never materialized.

At the time, the Medici Pope Leo X, son of Lorenzo il Magnifico, and his brother Giuliano seemed likely to form an Italian alliance, perhaps even a nation state.  As Machiavelli saw it, a Medici pope (or prince) who heeded his advice could bring a better future to Italy and perhaps even take up arms  to liberate the peninsula from its “barbarian” invaders—a vision of unification almost 350 years before the fact.    

What if this ruthless prince lost the adulation of his people?  Better to be feared than loved, shrugged Machiavelli, who observed that since men are generally ungrateful, vacillating, cowardly, and greedy, they might promise their souls to a prince yet  desert or betray him because love is fickle, while fear is not.  

As a case in point Machiavelli cited the notorious Cesare Borgia, called Il Valentino from his title as duke of Valentinois.  When his father, decadent and opportunistic,  assumed the papacy as Alexander VI, the two conspired to take over much of central Italy.  Machiavelli coolly describes how Borgia, to subdue unruly Romagna, “full of thefts, fights, and of every other kind of insolence,” hired   a “cruel and able” henchman and gave him full authority to do whatever was necessary to impose order.

Once the province was pacified, Borgia wanted to show the resentful populace that “if any form of cruelty had arisen, it did not originate from him but from the harsh nature of his minister.” So one morning the local citizens awoke to discover their hated overlord “placed on the piazza in two pieces with a block of wood and a bloody sword beside him.” Borgia had deftly accomplished his objective.   “The ferocity of such a spectacle,” Machiavelli wrote, “left the people satisfied and amazed at the same time.”   

When the Florentine Republic returned to power in 1527, Machiavelli applied for his old post but was rejected. He died soon thereafter.  His country, which ignored him in life, didn’t know quite what to say of him in death. His appropriately monumental tomb in 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.

To listen to a reading (in English) of The Prince, click below:

A Year of Italian Language and Culture: Italian Opera

la lirica
opera

La lirica (from l’opera lirica, or work in lyrics)  is the most Italian of inventions, a splendid confection of music, words, drama, costumes, sets, special effects, and complete suspension of belief that could not have emerged in any other country.  Nothing looks like Italian opera. Nothing sounds like Italian opera. And no one speaks or has ever spoken the elevated idiom found in the libretto  (little book) of virtually every classic Italian opera.

As soon as she steps on stage, a donna (woman) becomes a beltà (beauty) -- no matter how plain, old, or large the singer. Rather than a chiesa (church), she goes to a tempio (temple), where sacri bronzi (sacred bronzes) ring instead of campane (bells). Stage directions for battle scenes invariably call for the firing, not of a cannone, but of a bronzo ignivomo  (fire-vomiting bronze). 

Absurd though it may be, opera’s stile gonfiato, or inflated style, can  enchant -- no less than the  golden wings  of  music  that carry the poetic words aloft. I fell under its spell long before I knew a single sentence in Italian. As a graduate student at Columbia, I would buy a standing-room ticket  to the Metropolitan Opera and sidle into an empty seat, working my way ever closer to the stage.  At certain magical performances,  the  melding of words and music bypassed my ears and shot straight to my  heart.  I could actually feel it fluttering in my chest, directly beneath my seno.

When I moved to San Francisco to marry a man who had never even been to an opera, I won him over slowly.  On Saturday evenings we would anchor our little sail boat off Belvedere island, watch the stars, and listen to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on a portable radio.  Without the benefit of a libretto, we had to listen with our hearts, intuiting what the singers were saying. Within a year, Bob was hooked, and we had student tickets (he was a psychiatry resident at the time) to the Friday evening  series at the San Francisco Opera.

Back then I thought that learning Italian would help me understand opera better. Instead, the more I learned about la lirica,  the better I understood Italian -- and Italians.  Phrases from its overwrought libretti percolate through the language.

Every Alfredo sooner or later is implored, “Amami (“Love me!”), Alfredo!” from La Traviata, and every Aida becomes “celeste Aida,” another of Verdi’s heroines. Men who shake my hand on a chilly day break into, “Che gelida manina!” (“What a cold little hand!”)  from La Boheme. Thanks to la lirica, vendetta (vengeance)  is always tremenda (terrible), as in Rigoletto, while  lacrime (tears) are furtive (hidden), as in L’Elisir  d’Amore,  and spiriti (spirits) bollenti (boiling-hot), as in La Traviata.

 Click below to hear for yourself. 

Words and Expressions (from some of my favorite arias)

"E lucevan le stelle" --   The stars are fading,  from Puccini’s Tosca.  

"Un bel di vedremo ' --  A beautiful day we will see,  from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly

"O mio babbino caro" --  Oh my dear daddy,  from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi

"La donna è mobile" --  A woman is fickle, from Verdi’s Rigoletto

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

Photo above courtesty of San Francisco Opera by Ken Howard.

A Year of Italian Language and Culture: Italian Dialects

I dialetti
The dialects

For centuries the Italian peninsula was a patchwork of hundreds of dialects, often as different from one another as French from Spanish or English from Italian. Sailors from Genoa couldn’t understand—or be understood by—merchants from Venice or farmers from Friuli.  Florentines living in il centro, the historic heart of the city, couldn’t speak the dialect of San Frediano, my favorite neighborhood, on the other side of the Arno. 

A thousand years ago Italian Jews fashioned a dialect of their own mixed with Hebrew, now called Italkian, which is still spoken by about four thousand natives. A Venetian translated Shakespeare’s plays into his dialect because he felt that Italian was insufficient to transmit their emotional complexity.

A few dialects are relatively similar to the national language, but others—such as Piemontese, Neapolitan, and Sicilian—are distinct enough to qualify as separate languages. Consider one example: A  “head” is testa in Italian; co’ in Lombard; teta in Piedmontese; capoccia in Romanesco; coccia in Molisan; capa in Neopolitan; chepa in Lucanian; and conca in Sardinian.

When Italy became a unified nation in 1861, more than 90 percent of its new citizems spoke only or predominantly in dialect. For generations most  Italians were—and to some extent still are—bilingual, speaking a local dialect with family and friends and the “italiano standard”  learned at school in public. Despite the fascist regime's ban on their use, dialects—like traditional regional folk dances such as the tarantella—have survived.

Today, according to Italy’s national statistics bureau, 55 percent of  Italians still use  dialect some or most of the time when they are with family and friends. A quarter use dialect even when speaking to strangers. And so, depending on where you are in Italy, you might sit on a sedia, seggiola, or seggia; blow your nose into a fazzoletto, pezzuolo, or moccichino; and wear calzini, calzette, calze, calzettoni, calzettini, or pedalini with your shoes.

Bambino  may be the proper Italian word for a small child, but a “kid”   remains  a bimbo in Florence, a cittino in  Siena, a puteo in Venice, a figgeu in Savona (Liguria), a  burdel  in  Romagna, a frut in Friuli, and a quatraro in some southern dialects. Whatever  they are called, Italian kids are cherished by their mothers. As a well-known Neapolitan saying puts it, “ogni scarrafon' è bello a mammà soja."  “Every cockroach is beautiful in its mother’s eyes."

Words and Expressions

Li mortacci tua! -- Roman slang,  literally “bad wishes to your lousy dead ancestors!”  

Romano de Roma -- dialect for a Roman whose family has lived in the city for several generations

Tirrem innanz –- Milanese dialect for continuing onward despite difficulty, not giving up even though it’s hard.

Ca’gia fa -- Neapolitan  for “What can we do?”

Ajò –- Sardinian for “c'mon!”,  “let’s go!”

Eja –- Sardinian for “yes”

pizza cà pummarola ngoppa –- Neapolitan for “pizza topped with tomato sauce” 

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

A Year of Italian Language and Culture: The Art of Italy

l’arte

For centuries “Italy” has been synonymous with art. An estimated 60 percent of the world’s designated art treasures reside within its borders, and Italian paintings and sculptures grace museums and collections around the globe. But Italy did more than inspire masterpieces: it developed the visual language of Western culture and changed forever our concepts of beauty and its creators.

A thousand years ago Italian—or, more precisely, the Florentine dialect of the time--had no words for art or artist. Arte meant “guild,” a collective of specialists in a certain field. Painters, who belonged to the same guild as doctors and apothecaries, and sculptors, members of the guild of stone and wood workers, were artigiani, or artisans, anonymous craftsmen who worked with their hands, usually for low pay and little, if any, recognition.

This began to change in the late thirteenth century with the emergence of a painter unlike any who had come before. We know him as Cimabue (ox-head), a nickname his stubbornness may have earned. In Florence in 1286 Cimabue completed a panel of the Madonna surrounded by angels for the Church of Santa Maria Novella. The large figures, more life-like than any previous works, so stunned the townspeople that they carried the painting with great rejoicing and the sounding of trumpets in a triumphant procession through the city streets to the church.

Cimabue (c. 1240 — c. 1302) may have been the first celebrity artist, but an even greater talent, his apprentice Giotto di Bondone (1277-1337), soon eclipsed him. “In painting Cimabue thought he held the field,” Dante Alighieri wrote in the Divine Comedy, “And now it’s Giotto they acclaim.” Within a few years, painters throughout Italy were trying to emulate Giotto’s ability to make paintings breathe.

Two centuries after Giotto, the greatest artistic flowering the world has ever seen took place in Italy. The man who gave la rinascita (rebirth) or the Renaissance its name, was a prolific (if prosaic) painter and respected architect, Giorgio Vasari (1511 –1574), who wrote the first book of art history. He called artists artefici, creators of beauty like God himself, touched with the same genius that lifted poets above less noble souls. The first edition, entitled The Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors, from Cimabue up to Our Own Times, came out in 1550; a second, more inclusive version of Le Vite (The Lives, as it came to be known), in 1568.

Although dates and details have proven unreliable, Vasari did something no one else had: He made artists as immortal as their works. As the aging Michelangelo wrote in a laudatory sonnet, Vasari had brought the dead back to life and prolonged the life of the living (or the half-living, like himself, he added.} He also created a new vocabulary to discuss the capolavori (masterpieces) of Italian art.

Words and Expressions

la difficultà (difficoltà in contemporary Italian) -- the technical and aesthetic challenges of creating works of beauty.

giudizio dell’occhio -- judgment of the eye

la facilità -- the seemingly effortless ease with which artists created their works

meraviglia -- a sense of marvel or extraordinary delight inspired by art

stupore -– the amazement resulting from "the perception of a thing that exceeded the limits of the senses,” such as Michelangelo’s David

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

Click below for an up-close look at Michelangelo's shepherd boy:

A Year of Italian Language and Culture: La Bella Lingua

La lingua italiana

The Italian Language

La Settimana della lingua italiana nel mondo (the week of the Italian language in the world) was celebrated per la prima volta (for the first time) in October, 2001. Di anno in anno (year after year) the initiative has enjoyed successo crescente (growing success), attracting  un numero sempre maggiore di partecipanti (an ever growing number of participants) and testifying to la vitalità dell'interesse per la lingua e la cultura italiana in tutto il mondo (the vitality of the interest in Italian language and culture worldwide). The organization sponsoring this event is the Accademia della Crusca, known as  “La Crusca,” the oldest scholarly academy in Europe.

Its origins date back to the 1500s, when an unheralded but invaluable invention transformed Italian agriculture: il frullone, a sieve-like device that separated wheat from chaff to produce flour. A group of irreverent Florentine intellectuals, passionately devoted to preserving their language’s più bei fiori (loveliest blooms), decided to become human frulloni and separate the linguistic fior di farina (the flower of the wheat) from the coarse crusca (chaff or bran).The  self-declared Crusconi took on a lofty mission:  creating the first dictionary of officially recognized words in any language.

This was no dry academic venture by uptight language police. The Crusconi playfully gave themselves names related to farming, cooking, and baking, such as Lievito (yeast or leaven), Macinato (milled into flour), Sollo (soft or spongy), and Grattugiato (grated). Each Cruscone also selected a related symbol, such as a sieve or sheaf of wheat, which was embossed in vibrant colors upon a wooden pala (above), a shovel-like paddle bakers used to slide loaves of bread from an oven.

Despite their jocularity, La Crusca’s founding brothers took their mission seriously. Over decades of research, discussion, and debate, they created the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca, published on January 20, 1612. The 960 oversized pages of this unique compendium contained only words that qualified as “belle, signifcative, e dell’uso nostro” (“beautiful, noteworthy, and of our use,” that is, from Italian authors such as Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio).

When I had the privilege of turning the stiff, dry pages of a first edition of the Vocabolario, I was so moved that I became senza parole (speechless). This volume, constructed of words chosen to please the ear, the eye, and the soul, contains Italian’s genome. No less than the artists laboring in a Renaissance bottega, the language “bakers” of La Crusca had painstakingly created a living work of art: la più bella lingua del mondo (the most beautiful language in the world).

Words and Expressions

parolina, paroletta -- nice word

parolone -- big or long word, pompous-sounding word  

in parole povere -- in poor or plain words

È una parola! -- it’s a word (easier said than done)

in poche parole -- in short, in brief

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 touching tribute to Italy's beloved language:

A Year of Italian Language and Culture: Dante’s Inferno

L'Inferno

This year of Italian culture (l’anno della cultura italiana) commemorates seven centuries since the appearance of the first volume of Dante’s La Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy).

The epic poem begins on Good Friday in the year 1300, when “the pilgrim,” Dante’s 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. “Abandon hope, all you who enter here” ("Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'entrate") reads its infamous welcome sign.  

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.

Crossing steep slopes and thunderous waterfalls, the pilgrim endures terrible heat, bitter cold, and never-ceasing fiery rain. He beholds the fearsome sight of a river of blood carrying the bodies of the violent, with centaurs shooting arrows into those who dare raise their heads. He recoils from the disgusting stench of a fetid field of human waste where those who craved earthly things are planted head first up to their bare and wriggling rumps.

The cast of memorable characters includes Hell’s “staff” of giants, harpies, hybrids, and devils with fabulously depraved names like Scarmiglione, Calcabrina, and Draghignazzo. Italian school children still relish the sheer naughty delight of Dante’s description of Malacoda (Rotten Tail), the beastly leader of an army of devils who summons his wretched troops to battle by famously “making a trumpet of his ass” and farting. But in L'Inferno the “beast that stinks up the world” is Gerione, the allegory of  fraud (frode, falsità), who sports the face of a friendly man atop a body that is part winged hairy mammal and part reptile, with a long tail ending in a scorpion’s stinger.

Most grotesque, submerged in hell’s deepest cavern, is three-headed Lucifer, the stone-cold heart of darkness. Dante describes “how my blood ran cold and my voice choked up with fear” at the sight of him. The flapping of Lucifer’s bat wings freezes the river of tears shed as he eternally chews the three greatest sinners-- Judas, Brutus, and Cassius, traitors of God and Rome—in his three rapacious mouths.

The first editions of L’Inferno were an instant sensation, and 700 years later, Dante still rocks—literally. Bruce Springsteen, Patty Smith, and bands like Radiohead and Nirvana cite him as an inspiration.  Actor Roberto Benigni continues to perform “Tutto Dante” around the world. According to Italian gossip columnists, the fervid Dantista  may be expanding his repertoire and taking a role in the movie version of another Inferno, Dan Brown's mega-bestseller.

Quotations from Dante

“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita” -- In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost.

“Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona” -– Love, that allows no loved one not to love

“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

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

Click below to listen to Roberto Benigni reading the fifth canto of L'Inferno:

A Year of Italian Language and Culture: Italy's Greatest Storyteller

Giovanni Boccaccio

(1313-1375)

This year of Italian culture (l’anno della cultura italiana) in the United States marks the 700th birthday of the beguiling storyteller Giovanni Boccaccio, one of le tre corone (the three crowns)—along with Dante and Petrarch--of Italian literature. Every raconteur since—from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Dickens to Twain—stands in this spell-weaver’s debt.

Born in 1313, the year of the Inferno’s publication, the easygoing youth nicknamed Giovanni della Tranquillità became Dante’s first biographer, commentator, and public reader. Unlike Dante, who descended from a distinguished old family, Boccaccio was the illegitimate son of a merchant-banker, who brought the boy into his household and arranged an apprenticeship with the Naples branch of his bank. When he proved inept, young Boccaccio switched to law, another mismatch of temperament and talent.

All Boccaccio wanted to do was write, eat (he was a lifelong buona forchetta, or big eater), and chase women. He fathered two illegitimate children in Naples and another in Ravenna. But the unattainable woman he pined for was “Fiammetta” (little flame), the inspiration of his early writings.

Boccaccio might have ambled good-naturedly through life, but fate blindsided him. His father went bankrupt. Fiammetta shattered his heart. In 1348 the Great Pestilence killed a quarter of Florence’s citizens, including his stepmother and numerous friends.

Boccaccio became the foremost chronicler of Florence’s plague years, so devastating that many feared the world was ending. His antidote to the daily horror was an exuberant, entertaining, death-defying work of literature. In The Decameron, Italian’s first great prose narrative, a lieta brigata (merry brigade) of seven young women and three young men (pictured with Boccaccio above) take refuge in a country villa and swap 100 novelle (tales) of wily merchants, corrupt politicians, clever wives, henpecked husbands, and bumbling fools, all caught up in acts of love, lust, mischief, and treachery.

Boccaccio’s prose rivaled Dante’s poetry in its range, stretching Italian from the highest to the lowest levels. Contrary to the common perception, only about a quarter of his tales have bawdy themes, but these sparkle with such earthy vitality that Italian coined the word boccaccesco to describe a spicy story. (Synonyms include  impudico, indecente, lascivo, licenzioso, osé, piccante, salace, sboccato and spinto.)

Boccaccio’s zesty stories spread as swiftly as the contagion that inspired them. However, their author came to scorn them, along with the Italian vernacular, and chose instead to write turgid tomes in Latin. His girth grew, and his health deteriorated. After two marriages and countless liaisons, his love life soured to such an extent that Boccaccio derided all women in a misogynist treatise.

Boccaccio ultimately despaired of his literary merit and considered burning his works and his library. Petrarch stopped him. On Boccaccio’s death, his entire collection went to the monastery of Santo Spirito in Florence—a timeless gift to the world.

Boccaccio's words still live--and not just in books. You can follow the medieval master on Twitter!

Quotes from Boccaccio

"Bocca baciata non perde ventura, anzi rinnova come fa la luna"  -- A kissed mouth doesn't lose its freshness, for like the moon it always renews itself.

"Fate quello che noi diciamo e non quello che noi facciamo" --  Do as we say, not as we do.

“Solo la miseria è senza invidia" -- Poverty alone is without envy. 

Dianne Hales is the author of La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World's Most Enchanting Language.

Click below to learn more about Boccaccio's life (in Italian):