Becoming Italian Word by Word

LA PASSIONE in a Tuscan Hilltown

Two years ago I’d never even heard of Castiglion Fiorentino, a postcard-pretty town near Cortona, but when I arrived for my first visit, everyone seemed to know my name.  Posters featuring the cover of LA PASSIONE: How Italy Seduced the World dotted the streets.  

“Is that the American writer” a girl asked her mother as we walked by. “The one who wrote about San Filippino?”

A chapter in LA PASSIONE entitled “The Greatest Love Story Ever Told” highlights the story of  Rita Morgan Richardson, an Italian-American spearheading a campaign to rescue an abandoned baroque chapel in Castiglion Fiorentino. The Friends of San Filippino, the nonprofit organization that she created, has garnered support from Italophiles across the United States. But the response of the townspeople themselves has been even more dramatic.

Earlier this year teachers and administrators at the local middle school were so moved by the Save San Filippino project that they launched an initiative called “Only Steps Away: Discovering Nearby Treasures.” Students learned about their town’s cultural riches by studying the twelve churches within Castiglion Fiorentino’s medieval walls.

Classe Seconda Effe (2F) focused on San Filippino, dedicated to St. Filippo Neri, the patron saint of joy. Inspired by both the saint and the sad state of the endangered chapel,  they decided to “adopt” it.  On their own, the students  banded together to create artworks based on images from  San Filippino, which they sold to raise funds to preserve and restore the small church.

During the presentation of LA PASSIONE in Castiglion Fiorentino, five of the students read the story of the Save San Filippino campaign, translated into Italian from my book by Silena Faralli, a teacher at their school. I was deeply touched to hear them bring my words to life before a standing-room-only crowd of local residents in the splendid setting of the San Letucce chapel.

Also inspiring were the remarks of Mariarita Signorini, president of Italia Nostra, an Italian non-profit dedicated to preserving Italy’s cultural patrimony, and of the town’s Mayor Mario Agnelli, who invites visitors to come to Castiglion Fiorentino and discover its charms and history.

After the formal presentation, the padlocked doors of the chapel were opened for viewing.  Just like the town’s residents, my family and I were captivated by San Filippino’s still-splendid frescoes, cherubs and coffered ceiling.

During my visit, I met a local woman whose parents were the last couple to be married in San FIlippino in 1947. She radiated the newly re-ignited pride the people of Castiglion FIorentine feel for the architectural, cultural and spiritual jewel just “steps away” from their homes.

I extend heartfelt thanks to Rita Richardson and the Friends of San Filippino, to Italia Nostra, which co-sponsored the day’s events, to  Alfeo Tanganelli  of the charming Residence Le Santucce, to  Alberto Nocentini, owner of Nocentini bookstore,  and to the residents of  Castiglion Fiorentino, who embody la passione italiana.

 

Dianne Hales is the author of LA BELLA LINGUA: My Love Affair with Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language, MONA LISA: A Life Discovered and LA PASSIONE: How Italy  Seduced the World. For more information,  visit diannehales.com.

 

Celebrating a Nation and a Saint in Italy

Throughout Italy the Festa della Repubblica (Festival of the Republic) on June 2 commemorates the day in 1946 when the Italian people voted for a republic as their national form of government. Our adopted seaside town of Porto Ercole on the western coast of Tuscany has a double reason to celebrate.

June 2 is also la festa di Sant’Erasmo, the patron saint of the ancient fishing port and of all mariners. In addition to concerts, a rowing race, dances and a solemn mass, Porto Ercole honors its saint with a  procession of his relics to the sea, a lighted boat parade and a spectacular display of fireworks.

"Who was this Saint Erasmo?"  I asked a friend born on June 2 in Porto Ercole and, of course, named Erasmo. A bishop, he told me. Several of his fellow Portercolesi added that Erasmo was a martyr who once saved  a ship of local sailors from a tempest at sea.

To find out more, I went to Wikipedia, which presents the gruesome suffering of Sant’Erasmo  (known in English-speaking lands as Saint Elmo) as the stuff of legend. In the late third century, during the Roman persecution of Christians, Erasmo was jailed, "besprinkled...with foulness,” beaten with leaden mauls until his veins burst, thrown into a pit of snakes and worms and covered with boiling oil and sulfur. Through it all he remained calm, “thanking and loving God." Then lightning struck and electrocuted everyone around him.

Continuing to preach the Gospel, Erasmo was again captured and tortured, this time with burning oil poured into his mouth and a searing hot metal cloak wrapped around him. An angel swept him to safety. Other torturers plucked out his teeth with pincers, scraped his skin with an iron wool carder and pulled out his eyes with their fingers. In the grisliest account, Erasmo’s stomach was slit open and his intestines wound around a windlass, a type of winch used to hoist an anchor on a ship. 

Finally Erasmo was burned alive. A bluish flame appeared on the top of the pyre  and was interpreted as the saint’s soul ascending to heaven. The electrical discharges at the mastheads of ships during storms came to be called "Saint Elmo's Fire” (fuoco di Sant’Erasmo), a sign of the martyr’s protection.

The nationwide festivities on June 2 commemorate a much more recent event.  After the end of World War II, the Italian people went to the ballot boxes to choose the type of government they wanted. On June 2 and 3, 1946, they voted to end the monarchy that had ruled their country for 85 years. The final tally: 12,717,923 votes for the Republic and 10,719,284 against.

King Umberto II of the royal house of Savoy was deposed, and the male descendants of the family were exiled. A new nation—la Repubblica d’Italia—was born.

Although the Second of June has since become a national holiday,  for the people of Porto Ercole, it remains, first and foremost, a day to honor Il loro santo patrono--their patron saint.  

Dianne Hales is the author of LA BELLA LINGUA: My Love Affair with Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language, MONA LISA: A Life Discovered and LA PASSIONE: How Italy  Seduced the World. For more information,  visit diannehales.com.

 

The Power of a Passion for Italy

My little book on the Italian language had taken a beating.

The couple who brought the tattered, battered copy of LA BELLA LINGUA: My Love Affair with Italian, the World's Most Enchanting Language to the Italian Cultural and Community Center in Houstonexplained what had happened: They had trekked with it to every city, site, church, museum and restaurant mentioned in the book. They are planning to do the same with my new book, LA PASSIONE: How Italy Seduced the World—but that’s not all. They are moving to Italy next year. “Your books changed our lives,” they told me.

I was deeply touched, but I also recognized the underlying force that had possessed them: la passione italiana. For years I’ve felt the same insatiable hunger to explore, discover, create, pursue beauty, love and live with every fiber of one’s being. The most gratifying aspect of my recent book tour has been discovering how this passion  has touched and even transformed other lives.

At the Eagle Eye Bookshop in Atlanta, a woman shared a journal she kept during her travel in Italy. It literally overflowed with photos, postcards, ticket stubs, hand-written notes, dozens of other reminders of special times in special places. I could feel the passion captured in its pages.

At the American Italian Cultural Center in New Orleans, several Italian-Americans described how my books have rekindled their pride in and passion for their ethnic roots.  Some have taken Italian courses and  become fluent in Italian; a few have applied for dual citizenship.  Two proud parents were bringing LA PASSIONE  to their daughter, an opera singer in Milan.

“Let yourself be inspired,” I encouraged everyone who came to our events. Rita Richardson, an Italian-American from Nashville, offered personal testimony as she recounted the back story of her passion to save an abandoned Baroque chapel in the Tuscan town of Castiglion Fiorentino.

At each stop in our tour, when Rita showed images of the chapel, audiences gasped to see the beautiful frescoes, statues and coffered ceiling hidden inside the little church and applauded the ongoing efforts of the Friends of San Filippino to preserve this architectural and spiritual jewel.

The “Passion for Joy” tour continues next month in Italy. The town of Castiglion Fiorentino has organized a special celebration on Sunday, June 9. In addition to my presentation and and Rita’s update on progress being made on the chapel project, children of the local middle school will be displaying artworks to sell to raise funds for the restoration.  Others are translating my account of the “Save San Filippino” campaign in LA PASSIONE into Italian to read aloud. And, of course, there will be music and food and great fun. Please come if you’re in the area.

Rita and I will also be presenting in Florence at the  IBS Bookstore on Tuesday, June 11, at 6:00 p.m. and at the British Institute on Wednesday, June 12, at 6:00 p.m. I look forward to meeting you. Come celebrate the power of la passione with us!

I’d also like to extend heartfelt thanks to the Italian Cultural and Community Center of Houston, the American Italian Cultural Center of New Orleans,Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Octavia Books in New Orleans and Eagle Eye Bookshop in Atlanta, three of the independent book sellers who are the heroes of authors everywhere.

Dianne Hales is the author of LA BELLA LINGUA: My Love Affair with Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language, MONA LISA: A Life Discovered and  LA PASSIONE: How Italy  Seduced the World. For more information on her and her upcoming events, visit diannehales.com.

An Italian Passion for Joy

 

Two years ago a woman I didn’t know contacted me about an abandoned chapel dedicated to a saint I had never heard of in a Tuscan town I had never visited. Now her story is in LA PASSIONE: How Italy Seduced the World, and she and I are going on a “Passion for Joy” book tour.

The woman is Rita Morgan Richardson, a French teacher in Nashville. The saint is Philip Neri, patron saint of joy, whose followers built places for the faithful to worship and sing together. The chapel in Castiglion Fiorentino, a hilltop village of about 13,000 people near Cortona, had been falling into ruin for decades.

Then Rita Richardson came to town. Her ties to Italy run deep. While serving in the military in Italy, her American father met and married a lovely local woman and brought her to the United States. Although Rita grew up in Georgia, her staunchly Italian mother imparted a strong sense of her Italian heritage.

In 2010, during a visit to their son while he was studying in Cortona, Rita and her husband Tim ventured to nearby Castiglion Fiorentino. Taken by its picturesque charm, they bought a small home and returned several times a year.

Every day they would walk by a boarded-up church on their pedestrian-only lane. Curious, they discovered that it once housed a group of friars belonging to the Congregation of the Oratory, a religious order founded by Saint Philip Neri.

“I’m Catholic, but I had never heard of him,” says Rita. Neither have many others. Born in Florence in 1515, Philip began studying and then preaching in Rome. His friendly nature and ebullient sense of humor won so many converts that he became known as Rome’s “third Apostle,” after Saints Peter and Paul. According to legend, his heart grew so big with God’s love that people could see it pounding in his chest.

To attract more converts, Philip devised a form of religious theater, with performers reproducing biblical scenes set to music. Soon people were flocking to the entertaining shows that took the name of the hospital prayer hall used for the first performances—oratorio.

The oratorio built by his followers in Castiglion Fiorentino became a bustling community center, “a place where ordinary people experienced extraordinary things,” says Rita. “Tim and I wondered why someone wasn’t doing something to save a building so rich in history. When we asked, we always heard the same thing: ‘Crisi. Niente soldi.’ Economic crisis. No money.”

Then an unexpected passion seized Rita. “One day I just knew that the ‘someone’ to save San Filippino was me—even though I had never attempted anything like this.” With the permission of the local archbishop, she and Tim got their first glimpse of the chapel’s interior. Inside they found beautifully sculpted cherubs, a hand-painted balcony for the choir, and a wooden coffered ceiling of cobalt blue and gold.

“We were blown away,” Rita recalls. Launching a one-woman campaign, she formed the Friends of San Filippino, an official American nonprofit, and reached out to Italian American organizations and Italophiles. Their generosity, along with Rita’s passion and perseverance, so impressed the townspeople that they have wholeheartedly embraced the project.

“Sometimes we need foreigners to wake us from our torpor and make us look at things with the eyes of another,” says a local teacher. Community members have donated their artworks and auctioned off dinners and stays at local bed-and-breakfasts to raise funds. School children, like Nicole Chirila of Dante Alighieri Middle School in Castiglion Fiorentino (above), are creating and selling art works inspired by the chapel. The ongoing campaign has rekindled a pride in the past and a passion to keep the spirit of San Filippino alive.

“You can feel the love of San Filippino in Castiglion Fiorentino,” says Rita. “The world may be full of special places that deserve to be saved, but it’s also full of people with an inexplicable passion to do good works that they never knew they had.”

Rita and I are carrying this joyful message to Houston, New Orleans and Atlanta in our Spring ‘Passion of Joy” book tour.  If you can come to any of these events, we’d love to meet you!

Tuesday, May 7, 7:00 p.m.
Italian Cultural & Community Center
1101 Milford Street
Houston, TX

Wednesday, May 8, 6:00 p.m.
American Italian Cultural Center
537 S Peters Street
New Orleans, LA

Thursday, May 9, 7:00 p.m.
Eagle Eye Book Shop
2076 N Decatur Rd
Atlanta, GA

Dianne Hales is the author of LA BELLA LINGUA: My Love Affair with Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language, MONA LISA: A Life Discovered, and  LA PASSIONE: How Italy  Seduced the World. For more information on her and her Spring book tour, visit her website: diannehales.com.

Happy 10th Birthday to LA BELLA LINGUA!

Whether you're a parent or an author, your first born always remains close to your heart.

This month marks a landmark birthday for my first book on Italy and its culture: LA BELLA LINGUA: My Love Affair with Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language. My publisher is celebrating with a not-to-be-missed offer: a digital copy for just $1.99 — less than the price of, well, almost everything —downloadable here or at other online book retailers until May 5.

A book that keeps selling long after publication is said to “have legs." I like to think that LA BELLA LINGUA sprouted wings that continue to carry it to new readers and to bring wonderful new people into my life. In its eventful first decade, LA BELLA LINGUA became a best-seller in the United States, Canada and Australia, the subject of an acrostic (as well as a best-seller) in the New York Times, and the topic of several dissertations by Italian graduate students. In 2011 the President of Italy awarded me the highest recognition the government can bestow on a foreigner: a knighthood, with the title of Cavaliere dell'Ordine della Stella della Solidarietà Italiana (Knight of the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity) for the contributions LA BELLA LINGUA has made in promoting the Italian language. It is currently being translated into Italian—and Chinese!

Most gratifying to me has been the response of readers--from Vancouver to Paris to Sydney to Singapore. An artist who lives on a remote ranch in South Africa wrote that LA BELLA LINGUA  inspired her  lush paintings of Italian fountains and gardens.  A humanities professor in New York confessed that for two months he kept LA BELLA LINGUA in his  car, “bringing it out when I stopped at a wine bar for a drink or a bite to eat. And now that I have finished--what am I to do?”

A college student recalled choosing LA BELLA LINGUA from all the titles in a bookstore as a middle-schooler, reading it every year since, and learning Italian—first on her own, then in class. She based her college admissions essay on LA BELLA LINGUA’s being her favorite book and won a full scholarship to Northwestern. Still “wildly in love with languages," she wrote to say, “You changed my life irrevocably," and signed her note, "A grateful student."

LA BELLA LINGUA changed my life too. Through Italians I met while researching it, I discovered the largely unknown story of the real woman in Leonardo’s famous painting and wrote MONA LISA: A Life Discovered. This immersion in Renaissance Florence led to my most recent adventure: a quest for the secrets and sources of the fierce creative Italian  drive that has produced so many master works of art, music, crafts, food, wine, literature, cinema, fashion, and design. Just released, LA PASSIONE: How Italy Seduced the World  has been hailed as an " effervescent love letter to all things Italian” and a “delightful excursion into the heart of Italian culture.”

Whether you are Italian by birth or affinity, have visited or plan to visit Italy, are an armchair adventurer, or simply love pizza, pasta, or Prosecco, I invite you to get to know my literary “children.” But be forewarned: Like me and many of my readers, you might be swept away by la passione Italiana!

 

7 Reasons to Discover La Passione!

I am thrilled to announce the publication of my new book: LA PASSIONE: How Italy Seduced the World.

Like any author, I’m eager for people to read my book. But with more than 8 million titles on Amazon alone, why choose mine? Let me offer seven reasons, based on my discoveries as I traveled through Italy in search of la passione italiana.

1.The places you’ll go:
The Aeolian islands, where I learned the danger of angering ancient gods. The food markets of Bologna in the “fat belly” of Italy. The rolling hills of Piedmont, home to Barolo and Barbaresco, the king and queen of Italian wines. The atelier of the Italian sisters who dressed the movies’ great beauties when Rome was “Hollywood on the Tiber.”

2. The people you’ll meet:
Venice’s premiere “erotic glass artist,” who breathes passion into molten glass. An archaeologist who has excavated through almost three millennia of ruins to the first settlement in Rome. The “flying baroness” who roared to international celebrity as Italy’s first female race car driver. The poor boy from Southern Italy whose passion for feet inspired him to become “shoemaker to the stars.”

3. The stories you'll hear:
The lace-makers of Burano who saved their island from starvation, stitch by stitch. The ghost of the young Florentine who escaped from her tomb to “live twice” with her true love. The history of Neapolitan pizza. The singers, castrated as boys to preserve their high voices, who sublimated passion into song.

4. The tastes you’ll enjoy (vicariously):
Wine from a vineyard on an Umbrian hillside cultivated since centuries before Christ’s birth. Hand-made chocolate confections invented in Perugia by clandestine lovers. Balsamic vinegar aged in Modena for more than sixty years and drizzled over gelato. Passatelli, a pasta of cheese and breadcrumbs that I learned to make in a Bologna kitchen.

5. The experiences you’ll share:
A pre-Carnevale parade on the oldest canal in Venice. A 24-hour Good Friday processions of mammoth altars crafted centuries ago and carried through the streets of a Sicilian town. Lunch of traditional bagna cauda with young wine-makers in the Langhe. A stroll through Cinecittà, the fabled “Factory of Dreams” that still inspires all who  “have cinema in their blood.”

6.The joy you’ll find:
An Italian-American woman’s inspiring campaign to save an abandoned chapel in the Tuscan town of Castiglion Fiorentino. Sleek road rockets and the roar of their engines at the Ferrari museum in Modena. Heart-shaped balloons on Valentine’s Day in Verona, home to Shakespeare’s Juliet and her Romeo.  Moonlight in Venice and fireworks over the Bay of Naples.

7. For the lessons you may learn:
La passione italiana imparts simple but profound life lessons: Hold family close. Appreciate your senses. Cultivate compassion.  Share food and laughter with friends. Honor the sacred. Choose the bello over the brutto. Love without limits. Let the human spirit soar.

Whether or not you are Italian by blood or aspiration, have visited or dream of visiting Italy, love pasta and pizza (and who doesn’t?), let yourself by seduced by a passion that resonates in all our souls.

I look forward to sharing my Passione with you!

Dianne Hales is the author of LA BELLA LINGUA: My Love Affair with Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language, MONA LISA: A Life Discovered  and  LA PASSIONE: How Italy Seduced the World. For more information on her and her Spring book tours, visit her website: diannehales.com. 

As of the end of April, I will not be posting at “Becoming Italian Word by Word.” Instead, I am debuting a new blog, "A Passion for Italy," which will be available on my website, along with a complete archive of my previous posts. To subscribe, click HERE, and  go to the top of the sidebar. If you are already subscribed via e-mail to my Typepad blog, your subscription will automatically transfer to the new blog. However, if you subscribed via RSS, you will need to do so again, using the same link as above.

 

Easter in Sicily: The Passion of Christ

The Original Passione

Passion Sunday, the fifth Sunday of Lent, marks the beginning of a two-week period sometimes called Passiontide.  The early Christians fashioned the word passio from passus, the past participle of the Latin for "suffer."  I never fully comprehended this meaning until I went to Sicily for Holy Week.

Every  year the ancient port of Trapani brings the Passion of Christ to life in La Festa dei Misteri (the Feast of the Mysteries). Over the course of twenty-four hours, a parade of massive altars, each depicting a scene of Christ’s final days, winds through the town’s narrow streets. The altars, fashioned in elaborate detail in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, have survived floods, fires, and Allied bombings in World War II.

Squads of muscular men grasp one another’s shoulders, pressing close into a crosshatch of intertwined arms as they hoist each tableau aloft. Sweating and grimacing, they weave in a wavelike rhythm called the annacata, stepping forward and back and side to side. Two white-haired widows standing next to me provide a running commentary. The men move like the sea, surging in and out with the tides, one explains. The other insists that the rhythmic dance started because the porters drank so much along the route that they staggered, dropping an altar on more than one occasion.

As day darkens into dusk, I find myself swept into the procession. When I try to break away, I hear voices calling “Guarda! Guarda! Guarda!” (Look! Look! Look!). Just turning a corner, a little girl, caped in black, leads dozens of mournful women carrying candles and rosaries. Inching its way behind them is yet another altar with a single regal statue: La Madonna Addolorata, the sorrowful mother of Christ, draped in velvet robes. A silver heart gleams in her chest. Above it—suddenly lit by a ray of the setting sun—flashes a sword. This is a Sicilian mother, stabbed by grief for her beloved child yet standing strong and resolute.

Finally, on Holy Saturday, the altars make  their way back inside their home church.  The parish priest gives thanks to the people of Trapani—for their labor, their time, and, above all, their inspiring passion.

On Easter, I once again hear a marching band and rush outdoors. At the end of a sun-dappled street, I behold an altar with the risen Christ, tall and triumphant, surrounded by lilies, carried by a fresh crew of burly porters. The crowd cheers. Steeple bells ring. I breathe in the scent of spring flowers and candle smoke. The faces around me glow with jubilation. When I join the parishioners admiring the altars on display, a young priest  asks what I thought of the procession.

“Bellissimo,” I say, adding that I am touched to see such beauty inspired by such pain and sorrow. “No, signora,” he says gently. “You are mistaken. It is not suffering that we celebrate in the Passion of Christ. It is love.”

Indeed it is: the great love that conquered the empire that had conquered the world and gave rise to the largest religion in history. And it is love that we find at heart of every Italian passion.

Dianne Hales is the author of LA BELLA LINGUA: My Love Affair with Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language, MONA LISA: A Life Discovered, and the upcoming LA PASSIONE: How Italy  Seduced the World. For more information on her and her Spring book tour, visit her website: diannehales.com.

A Passion for Italy

A New Blog for a New Book

I didn’t have a clue. I had never set up a website, written a blog, created a Facebook group, or composed a single tweet. All that changed ten years ago when I prepared to launch my first Italy-themed book.

La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language attracted readers around the world, earned for me the great honor of being knighted by the President of Italy, and garnered a spot on the New York Times best-seller list and as the subject of a Times acrostic. The companion blog that I created — "Becoming Italian Word by Word" — also took on a life of its own, attracting almost two million visitors and winning a “blogger of the year” award for “Best Arts and Cultural Blog” from Italy magazine.

Over the last decade readers have come from just about every country -- Italy, England, Ireland, Poland, China, India, Japan, Australia, Samoa, Russia, Morocco, Germany, Brazil, Chile. A woman on a ranch in South Africa wrote to say my blog had inspired a series of paintings of Italian gardens. A group of nuns doing missionary work followed it regularly. Many teachers used the blog to spark conversation in class. One woman translated and read  each post to her blind elderly brother, who had been born in Naples.

To all my readers and followers, grazie di cuore. I thank you from my heart. But after a decade of focusing on words and expressions in la bella lingua, I am changing gears. As of the end of April, I will not be posting at “Becoming Italian Word by Word.” Instead, I am debuting a new blog, "A Passion for Italy," which will be available on my website, along with a complete archive of my previous posts. To subscribe, click HERE and  go to the top of the sidebar. If you are already subscribed via e-mail to my Typepad blog, your subscription will automatically transfer to the new blog. However, if you subscribed via RSS, you will need to do so again, using the same link as above.

My new blog will go beyond the pages of LA PASSIONE: How Italy Seduced the World  to present more interviews with passionate Italians and more descriptions as well as photographs of the people I met and the places I visited.  I am excited about sharing the backstories of my research with you, and I hope you enjoy discovering more about  the Italian passions that seduced the world.

Dianne Hales is the author of LA BELLA LINGUA: My Love Affair with Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language, MONA LISA: A Life Discovered, and the upcoming LA PASSIONE: How Italy  Seduced the World. For more information on her and her Spring book tours, visit her website: diannehales.com.

What is "la passione"?

“Of course, you are Italian,” a Roman friend insisted years ago, “You have something more important than blood: la passione.”

I accepted the compliment without fully comprehending its significance. Passion, after all, can bloom anywhere. Think of France, with its culinary cathedrals; Spain, with its bullfights; Argentina, with its tango—not to mention the millions of soulmate seekers pursuing passion online. Yet these pursuits now strike me as mere imitations. How could it be otherwise? The original, including the word itself, was made in Italy.

In the first century AD, newly minted Christians, constructing a vocabulary for their fledgling religion, chose the term passio for the agony that Jesus endured to redeem a world of sinners. Etymologists trace its roots to the Latin passus, past participle of pati (to suffer), inspired by the “sacrificio di Cristo e a quells dei prima martiri” (the sacrifice of Christ and that of the first martyrs).

Healers appropriated the word for maladies such as “passion of the liver”—a diagnosis that conjures an organ engorged with rage. Medieval writers—Dante foremost among them— recognized romantic love as una passione so compelling that it could not be resisted. The Renaissance extended the definition of la passione to any all-consuming quest, most often for beauty in its infinite variety. Romantics idealized the irresistible intensity of such ardor, even when it exploded into “crimes of passion.”

Although modern English-language dictionaries acknowledge the religious roots of “passion,” they define it as a state or an outburst of strong emotion, intense sexual love, or deep desire or enthusiasm. La passione is all these—and much more.

The Dizionario Affettivo della Lingua Italians (Emotional Dictionary of the Italian Language) describes la passione as a flammable material—volatile and dangerous. When it possesses you, it causes infinitesimal, voracious particles to pulsate in the blood. You risk burning like a torch, flaming bright, and then disintegrating into embers. When you are inside la passione, nothing else can enter your mind. When it flees, you search desperately for more.

Passion—and passion alone—lifts us above the ordinary. Without passion, there would be no literature, no art, no music, no romance, perhaps none of the wonders Italians have wrought. Beyond sentiment or emotion, la passione qualifies as a primal force of nature that cannot be ignored or denied.

You will find more--much more--about this fierce drive to explore, discover, create, pursue beauty, and love and live with every fiber of one’s being in my new book, La Passione: How Italy Seduced the World. You can preorder it here or find it wherever books are sold on April 16. 

Dianne Hales is the author of LA BELLA LINGUA: My Love Affair with Italian, the World's Most Enchanting Language, MONA LISA: A Life Discovered and the upcoming LA PASSIONE: How Italy  Seduced the World. For more information on her and her Spring book tours, visit her website: diannehales.com.

Cari amici, I will be moving my blog to my new website, along with a complete archive of my previous posts.  Click HERE  to subscribe (top of sidebar).  Note that if you are already subscribed (via e-mail) to my Typepad blog, your subscription will automatically transfer to the new blog.  However, if you subscribed via RSS, you will need to do so again (using the same link as above).  Thank you!

 

 

March News from Dianne

“Imagine a world without Italy: Painting without Leonardo. Sculpture without Michelangelo. Literature without Dante. No Verdi choruses or Puccini arias. No Fellini films or Ferrari roar. Heavens uncharted, vines unplanted, tables bereft of pasta, pizza, and a Sicilian cake so divine that its bakers swore it could make the dead breathe again.”,

This is how LA PASSIONE: How Italy Seduced the World begins.

Western culture is indeed unimaginable without Italy. Its borders contain more  of UNESCO’s designated cultural treasures than any other nation. Its inhabitants created the first universities, banks, public libraries, and law and medical schools; mapped the moon (in 1651); split the atom; produced the first modern histories, satires, sonnets, and travelogues; invented the first working compass, battery, barometer, microscope, radio, and thermometer; garnered twenty Nobel Prizes; and bestowed upon the world the eternal gift of music.

But why Italy? How did a scrawny peninsula smaller than California  leave such an outsize imprint on Western culture?

After  decades of searching for answers,  I credit la passione italiana. My new book, available now for pre-order and on sale wherever books are sold on April 16, explores this primal force and its impact on food, wine,  romance, literature, art, music, religion, film, fashion--and very fast cars.

I’m excited about sharing the story of how la passione italiana seduced the world—in print and in person. Here is the initial list of places where I’ll be speaking this spring.  You can find details on the Events page of my website, which will be updated as we firm up additional dates for the summer and fall.

San Francisco:

Italian Cultural Institute, 6:30 p.m., April 17 (with Frances Mayes)

Libreria Pino, 6:30 p.m., April 24 (with Lisa Engelken)

Il Cenacolo (members and guests), noon, May 16

Marin County

Book Passage, Corte Madera, 4:00 p.m., April 28

East Bay

Stanford Women’s Book Club (private), morning, May 2

Orinda Books, 2:00 p.m., May 2

Houston

Italian Cultural & Community Center, 7:00 p.m., May 7 (with Rita Richardson of Friends of San Filippino)

New Orleans

American Italian Cultural Center, 6:00 p.m., May 8 (with Rita Richardson)

Atlanta

Ciancia Conversation Club, 7:00 p.m., May 9 (with Rita Richardson)

If you’re in Italy this June, I’ll be presenting my book at an event sponsored by the Friends of San Filippino  on Sunday, June 9, in the lovely Tuscan town of Castiglion Fiorentino and in a lecture at the British Institute in Florence on Wednesday, June 12.

I look forward to meeting many of you in my travels. Come and discover la passione italiana!

                                                                                                                                                A presto,

                                                                                                                                                Dianne

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