The Pursuit of Italy

by David Gilmour

  Modern Italian is derived from the spoken form of classical Latin, later known as ‘vulgar’ Latin, volgare latino, perhaps more happily translated as ‘vernacular’. During its gradual evolution it accepted colloquialisms seldom found in literature together with diminutives, which allowed frater and soror, for example, to metamorphose into fratello and sorella. Yet the development of the language was hampered for centuries by the continued supremacy of Latin, the language of prose, of culture and of the Church. Apart from in Greek outposts in the south, Latin was the only written language until the thirteenth century and was used in schools for much longer. Italian was spoken in the vernacular with regional variations from the eighth century but was not written for another 500 years and then only occasionally, for poetry, in the Hohenstaufen court at Palermo and at Lucca and Pisa in western Tuscany. Poets writing in Italian had to contend not only with the dominance of Latin but also with the troubadours of Provence, who inspired writers in the north and whose language the Venetians briefly adopted for their literature.

  The posthumous role of Dante Alighieri in the development of Italian has long been treated with reverence and solemnity. The great Florentine poet was, according to one scholar, not only ‘the father of the Italian language’ but also ‘the father of the nation and the symbol of national greatness through the centuries’.21 It is doubtful that Dante would have thought the second part of the description applicable to him, especially as he believed Italy should be part of the Holy Roman Empire and not a nation by itself. Yet he did write The Divine Comedy (or, as he himself called it, simply La Commedia) in Italian and extolled the virtues of the vernacular, the ‘new sun’ that would put Latin in the shade, in De vulgari eloquentia, a book he wrote in Latin.

  The works of Dante, like those of his younger fellow Tuscans Petrarch and Boccaccio, advanced the cause of the Florentine vernacular in the later Middle Ages, even though Petrarch usually wrote in Latin and Dante thought bolognese a more beautiful language. By the sixteenth century it was widely felt that the peninsula’s literary language should be close to theirs, a feeling which suggests that, if the great trio had been born in Sicily, the island’s dialect would have been adopted as Italian, which foreigners would have had great difficulty in understanding.‡‡ Pietro Bembo, the Venetian scholar and cardinal, argued that, if writers in Latin imitated Cicero and Virgil, then writers in the vernacular should model themselves on Petrarch and Boccaccio. Although some people hoped for a more modern form of Tuscan, Bembo’s arguments were persuasive, and several writers of the age decided to ‘Tuscanize’ their work. Latin scholars who scorned the vernacular as common and brutish – ‘a language of the plebs is a plebeian language’ – were defeated. There was even a sixteenth-century fashion for foreigners to study Tuscan in Italy in order to further their careers in diplomacy and commerce or sometimes simply to appreciate Dante and Ariosto.22 Later, around 1600, another towering Tuscan, the Pisan astronomer Galileo, demanded that scientific work also should be conducted in the vernacular, arguing that more people would then be able to understand his work – an argument which the papacy failed to appreciate.

  Tuscan had several advantages in its quest to become the Italian language: apart from its literary beauty, the spoken and written languages were similar, and its sounds as well as its grammatical rules made it closer to Latin than other dialects – the Latin sanctus and bello becoming Tuscan santo and bello but Sicilian sando and beddu. Furthermore, while in the rest of Italy Latin was the language of education until the eighteenth century, it had been replaced by the vernacular in Tuscany two centuries earlier. Florence is still regarded as the best place to learn Italian, though it is often claimed that in Siena (where people like to say opara instead of opera) the pronunciation is better. The inhabitants of Lucca are equally proud of the way they talk, though they tend to leave out the hard ‘c’ at the beginning of a word so that mi casa – my house – sounds like mi hasa. The Tuscan Count Sforza, who managed to be Italy’s foreign minister before as well as after Mussolini, claimed that ‘perfect pronunciation’ would be ‘Tuscan speech in a Roman mouth’,23 a slightly smug remark that unintentionally drew attention to the problem that in Italy the political and literary capitals were different.

  Five centuries after Dante, Alessandro Manzoni, whose first language was milanese and his second French, promoted Tuscan as the language of Italian resurgence, even to the extent of studying in Florence so that he could write a new edition of his immense novel The Betrothed in the Tuscan vernacular, a process he called ‘rinsing’ his story in the Arno. Yet the attempts of Manzoni and others to impose a language spoken in only one region on a whole country were perhaps arrogant and certainly naive. How could you have a national language that was spoken in only one of the nation’s chief cities? Nearly everyone outside Tuscany conducted their private and professional lives in dialect; for them literary Italian was a dead language or at best an official one, which sounded strange and artificial when they tried to speak it; moreover, unlike English and French, it had been scarcely enriched since the Middle Ages. This unsatisfactory state produced particular conundrums for literary folk. In the eighteenth century the Venetian Carlo Goldoni wrote his plays in three different languages – Venetian dialect, Tuscan and eventually French, the language of his memoirs. Two centuries later, Ignazio Silone wanted the peasants in his novel Fontamara to speak their own language – a dialect of the Abruzzi – but realized he had to make them speak a language they didn’t know (Italian) so that his readership would understand what they were saying.

  In any case the attempted imposition only partially and tardily succeeded. In 1861, the year the Kingdom of Italy was born, it has been calculated that one Italian in forty (2.5 per cent of the population of the peninsula) spoke Italian: just over 630,000 people – mainly Tuscans speaking what was after all their own dialect – out of a total of 25 million.24 Even if we add others who had some familiarity with the language, such as those who had read it at secondary school, it is difficult to push the figure beyond 10 per cent. For the 80 per cent of the population classified as illiterate, Italian was a foreign language, not only in the south, where it was largely incomprehensible, but even in Venice, where lawyers and judges still talked in Venetian. Decades earlier, Byron had to speak dialect in Venice so as to be understood, and the friend who observed that it was like talking to an Irishman in brogue was quite wrong.25

  Such problems were not unique to Italy in that era. Spain had four languages and a host of dialects; in France most of the south-western communes did not speak French, and few Parisians could understand what people were saying south of Lyon. Yet the situation was more critical in Italy. Over half the population spoke Castilian in Spain or French in France, and both languages had long been in use for administration and literature. In Italy nearly everyone spoke in dialect, not just peasants and artisans and the urban poor, but merchants, aristocrats and even monarchs. The Neapolitan King Ferdinand II spoke in Neapolitan, and so did his court. The Piedmontese King Victor Emanuel II (later King of Italy) spoke Piedmontese when he wasn’t speaking French; so did his heirs, even after three generations of living in Rome. Most of the early statesmen of united Italy came from Piedmont and had to learn Italian as a new language: the best of them, Camillo Cavour, was happier speaking French and was so ignorant of how people talked in the south that he thought Sicilians still spoke Arabic. Francesco Crispi, a Sicilian who twice became prime minister, had an unusual linguistic ordeal to come through. Albanian was the language of his family, Greek the language of his church (he was baptized a Greek Orthodox) and Sicilian the language of his youth; in certain situations Italian may have been his fourth language.26

  After unification Italian became more extensively spoken. Governments assisted the process with bureaucracy, school textbooks and the decision to enter the First World War, when millions of men drafted from all over the country were stationed together on the banks of the Isonzo River in Friuli. Yet there were other factors o
ver which they had no control such as demographic movements and newspapers that wanted readers beyond the confines of their local town. Another instrument of dissemination was the country’s favourite children’s book, The Adventures of Pinocchio, whose author had family in the Tuscan village that gave him his pseudonym, Collodi.

  Italians use an English word to describe these developments: they have been standardizzando their language for decades, and it is now more or less ‘standard’. English words have been infiltrating Italian for over a century: ‘week-end’ appeared in Panzini’s Dizionario moderno in 1905 and was followed by ‘pullover’, ‘smoking’ (for dinner jacket) and similar novelties. Va bene, gentle and ubiquitous in the 1970s, has now been largely driven out by OK. English is increasingly used in journalism, even when the Italian equivalents are just as appropriate: companies do ‘outsourcing’, people are ‘politically correct’ (or more usually aren’t), there is a ministry for ‘Welfare’ (though not yet a Treasury), and Silvio Berlusconi calls himself the ‘recordman della persecuzione’, meaning he is more victimized than anyone else – which he isn’t. Even a serious magazine like L’Espresso prefers ‘Bye Bye’ to Addio in giant lettering on its cover, while inside it will employ the words ‘bluff’, ‘blackout’, ‘privacy’, ‘dynasty’ and ‘killer’ all in the headlines of a single issue. The ugliest and most recent anglicism is the use of ‘big’ as a noun so that the leading figures of a political party, once referred to as i leader, are now known as i big.

  Modern Italian has many foreign influences besides English. The Ostrogoths donated a few dozen words, usually rather ugly ones such as stecca (a stick) and strappare (to wrench). The Lombards were more generous, though theirs too are not beautiful: gruccia (a crutch), guancia (a cheek), spaccare (to cleave) and schernire (to sneer). Many words in dialects were introduced by the Arabs, who also furnished Italian with much of its maritime vocabulary, for example ammiraglio, arsenale, tariffa and dogana (customs). Catalan and Castilian influenced certain dialects during the periods of Spain’s political dominance, but they were superseded in importance at the end of the seventeenth century by French, whose partisans regarded it as the true heir of Latin, a masculine language of logic and clarity in contrast with Italian, which they deemed feminine and emotional, suitable for opera and musical instructions.§§ French remained fashionable during the first half of the twentieth century, with ragoût taking a long time to become ragù. Until the Second World War foreign names were routinely pronounced in a French way, Churchill as Scürscill and Chamberlain as Sciamberlèn.27

  However standardizzato Italian now is, the country retains its dialects as well as certain areas where foreign languages are spoken and protected. In the Val d’Aosta French has parity with Italian, as German has in the Alto Adige (the South Tyrol), where it is the mother tongue of most people and where churches celebrate mass alternately in both official languages. Italy’s second language is sardo, which is spoken by a million people, though I have met Sardinians who have lived on the island for decades and have never understood a word of it. It has no literature except folk verse and it is subdivided into so many dialects that there are seven ways of saying Friday in sardo. Sounding more like Spanish than Italian, it has taken rio for river (riu in sardo) instead of fiume; in some areas it also retains Latin words such as domus for house instead of casa. On the island’s west coast at Alghero people speak Catalan because they are of Catalan descent, settled there by a king of Aragon after he had expelled the local Sardinian population in the fourteenth century. Further south, on the little island of San Pietro, descendants of eighteenth-century settlers from the north talk in an old-fashioned form of the Piedmontese dialect.

  Elsewhere Greek is still spoken in parts of Apulia and Calabria, Slovene is common in Udine, and pockets of Albanian survive in the provinces of Foggia, Taranto, Potenza, Cosenza, Catanzaro and also in Sicily. In the Dolomites a few thousand people speak Ladin, a Rhaetian dialect close to Swiss Romansh, which in some Alpine valleys is taught in schools alongside German and Italian. Further east along the mountains, in the region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, friulano (another Rhaetian dialect) is now an official language (thus joining Italian, Slovene and German in notices in government buildings), but most inhabitants of the regional capital, Trieste, do not speak it and stick to their own dialect, triestino.

  The use of dialect is decreasing in most places but it does so slowly, partly because parents are usually proud of their roots and like to pass their ancestral speech on to another generation. The region of Emilia still has a dozen dialects, among them modenese, ferrarese, bolognese and parmigiano; many people in the Lombard town of Bergamo still refuse to speak anything other than bergamasco. As late as 1974 more than half the population of Italy spoke only in dialect within the family. Before the turn of the century that proportion had dropped, but still two-thirds of them either spoke solely in dialect or else in a mixture of dialect and Italian when at home; for them dialect is the maternal tongue, Italian the second language, the one they learn at school as what the Venetian actor, Lino Toffolo, calls ‘our first foreign language’.28

  If dialect is now spoken mainly by Venetians, southerners and the old, it will continue to decline, but there are and have been plenty of people on the alert to obstruct the process. After the Second World War the writer and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini set up the Academy for the Friulian Language despite the fact that he was born and educated in Bologna; he wrote his first volume of poetry in friulano, used the Roman dialect for his fiction and towards the end of his life denounced television as the destroyer of Italy’s rich heritage of dialects. In the commune of Como, on the southern shore of the homonymous lake, people can now get married in lumbard rather than Italian; the newspaper La Padania recently appeared in Venetian; and at the festival of the Northern League speeches are simultaneously translated into the Milanese dialect known as meneghino. In much of the country Italians are eager to study their local dialect, and many people in Bologna enroll in a course called Caurs ed Bulgnais.29

  The idea that a language is purer than a dialect is common but untrue: the relationship between the two is simply that of winner and loser. We talk of the Italian language and the Venetian dialect as if the second is a sort of deviant of the first whereas it is in fact much older, evolving from Latin centuries before the birth of Dante. Fortunately Venetian remains alive and is being constantly replenished: in the port of Marghera people today use four distinct types of slang. Over the years the language has given English (as well as Italian) essential words from its vocabulary, including ghetto, casino, lagoon, marzipan, quarantine and scampi. Outsiders, even Italians who have settled in Venice, find the dialect strange and hard to understand, partly because of the ‘vanishing L’ which means, for instance, that the pronoun ‘he’ (lui in Italian, lu in Venetian) is pronounced yu.30

  A foreigner in Italy who walks about and eats in restaurants will quickly notice how extensively variations of language have been preserved. In Venice he will find that squares are called fields (campi) rather than piazze; the city has two piazzette next to its one piazza, San Marco. Meals and menus will invariably be a puzzle, even if he has a pocket dictionary. If he wants breakfast in Rome he should ask for colazione but if he uses the word in Turin or Milan he will get lunch; similarly pranzo in Rome is the midday meal while in the north it often means dinner, which elsewhere is cena. His phrasebook may tell him that solo per il pranzo means ‘only open for lunch’ but, if he sees the sign on a restaurant door in Vicenza, it will mean ‘only open for dinner’. Even if he gets the word right, he has to be careful when ordering his breakfast: in the north a croissant is, confusingly, a brioche, while in Rome, even more confusingly, it is a cornetto, which can also be a musical instrument, a string-bean and a type of ice-cream.

  When he goes out for his pranzo/cena, the tourist’s confusion will increase. If he wants to start with anchovies, he would have to ask for acciughe when he is in the north and alici when he trav
els south; should he want to eat them with focaccia, it would be fine to ask for this in Tuscany and Liguria, but further north the word is gnocco and to the east in Modena it becomes stria; in Venice the word focaccia exists but means something different: a sweet cake rather than a savoury bread. The travelling carnivore is in a state of permanent confusion: lamb is abbacchio in Rome but agnello in Tuscany; a bistecca in Milan is a boneless slice of meat, but in Florence it is a giant T-bone steak, which the Milanese call a bracciola al osso. Yet the vegetarian too has a multitude of problems. Pasta is mysteriously transformed into minestra in the north, while lattuga (lettuce) becomes insalata romana in the capital. The Roman carciofo becomes arcicioffo and arciciocco in the north, ardigioco in Genoa and thence artichaut in France and artichoke in Britain. If a melon is desired at the end of dinner, the water variety (cocomero) is melone d’acqua in Naples and the ordinary melone becomes a popone in Tuscany.

  Perhaps the restaurateur’s son will offer to help the customer in his bewilderment. If he is still a boy, he is a ragazzo in Italian and a ragasol in modenese, but in most dialects he is something linguistically unrelated. Merely to take words for boy beginning with the letter ‘p’, he might be a putel in the Trentino, a pischello in Rome, a putlet in Mantua, a piliso in Piedmont, a picciottu or picciutteddu in Sicily, a pizzinnu or piccioccu in Sardinia, and a picciriddu in the Salento. Were he to travel across the north from Genoa to Friuli, he could be metamorphosed, not very mellifluously, from garsùn to fànte, magatel, bagalt, redesòot, toso, butèl, mulo, fioo and frut.