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Grazie, Dianne

bello

bello
beautiful, lovely, wonderful

“Wow!” “Cool!” “Fantastic!” “Terrific!” “Fabulous!” We couldn’t say enough to praise the magnificent fireworks exploding over Porto Ercole in celebration of its patron Saint Erasmo. I turned to one of our guests, a young Umbrian winemaker, and asked what he thought. He replied with a single word, “Bello!”, and I realized that in these two simple syllables, he had said it all.

Italian, la bella lingua, has no greater—or more ubiquitous—compliment. A nice thing is qualcosa di bello. Italy itself long ago earned the nickname il bel paese (the beautiful country). Beautiful singing—bel canto—took flight here. Italy’s designers clothe il bel mondo, the fashionable world. Its citizens have perfected the standard of courtesy and style known as bella figura, which applies even to life’s end. “Fare una bella morte” means to die a noble or good death.

All of which was just too bello for the British writer Aldous Huxley, who complained, “From a cornice by Michelangelo to a belpaese cheese or the most horrible dribbling baby, everything is beautiful.” But as I’ve listened to Italians, I’ve realized that not every “bello” is una bella parola (a kind word).

An out-and-out scoundrel, for example, is un mascalzone bell’e buono who might tell tales “delle belle”—real beauts or whoppers, we’d say in English—or try to farsi bello con le penne del pavone (make himself beautiful with the peacock’s feathers—with borrowed finery, that is).

Yet Italian reverence for beauty (la bellezza) is genuine and runs deep. When I complimented a hostess on her exquisitely decorated dinner table, she taught me an Italian proverb: Anche l’occhio vuole la sua parte. The eye also wants its due. Italians grow up knowing that it is as important to feed the hungry eye as the hungry stomach.

One day I was watching toddlers romp among the sculptures and fountains of Florence’s Boboli Gardens. “Do they even see the beauty all around them?” I asked my companion. “Certo,” she replied, “Sentono la bellezza.” The verb she chose—the third-person plural of sentire—goes beyond “seeing” to encompass all the senses. These fortunate children, I realized, were breathing in beauty like air. And what could be more bello than that?

Sayings and Expressions:

il bello della vita – the beauty of life

fare la bella vita – to live the high life

Questo è sole per bellezza – this is only for decoration

“Non è bello quel che è bello, è bello quel che piace”—it’s not that which is beautiful that is beautiful; what’s beautiful is what pleases one”; in other words, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

furbo

furbo
cunning or crafty person

Only after years of visiting Italy did I realize that Italians admire rather than disdain a furbo, someone who can pull off a clever deception. “Che furbetto!” a young mother exclaimed rather proudly when her son shifted the blame for a childish prank to his little brother.

An impressed friend recounted how a shrewd furbacchione had obtained a coveted building permit for a rectangular, cement-lined hole in his backyard by describing it, not as a swimming pool (prohibited by law), but as a storage vat for water that local firefighters might need to douse a blaze. A more deceitful furbastro would somehow manage to make money in the process, while a wheeler-dealer furbone would go after big profits by negotiating permits for an entire village.

The furbo holds a prominent place in Italian history. Although best known as a seducer, Giovani Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) swindled his way to (and through) several fortunes. The self-declared Count of Cagliostro (1743-1795), a Sicilian street urchin, conned gullible souls across Europe with magical elixirs for youth and potency, mystical spells and skillful forgeries.

The Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) hoodwinked Hitler himself. When the Fuhrer visited Rome in May, 1938, Il Duce proudly displayed a prosperous imperial city. But its walls of gleaming travertine marble were nothing more than painted stage sets. The poet Trilussa wrote a famous epigram in Roman dialect on the occasion:

“Roma de travertino, / rifatta de cartone, / saluta l’imbianchino, / suo prossimo padrone.”
(“Rome of travertine, re-made with cardboard, greets the house pointer who will be her next master”)

My husband, transformed from Bob to Roberto in Italy, cannot resist a linguistic version of furbizia by casually dropping well-rehearsed Italian witticisms into conversations as if he were fluent. Italian acquaintances invariably applaud Professor Roberto for his cleverness.

However, some furbizia also lurks in my soul. The very first aphorism I taught Bob—and encouraged him to say on every occasion—was, Mia moglie ha sempre ragione. My wife is always right.

Sayings and Expressions:

Non fare il furbo—don’t try to be clever.

Per conoscere un furbo, ci vuole un furbo e mezzo – to know a trickster, it takes a trickster and a half (roughly, it takes one to know one)

An Italian friend recalls a childhood rhyme her friends would recite while rhythmically bouncing a ball against a wall:

Calzolaio Furbacchione (The shrewed shoemaker)
Fa le scarpe di cartone (makes shoes out of cardboard)
La signora non ci bada (the lady doesn’t notice)
Perde il tacco a meta’ strada (she loses the heel along the way).

Spazzatura

spazzatura
sweepings, trash, refuse

At one of my first formal Italian classes, I entered the room with an empty paper coffee cup in hand.

“Spazzatura?” the amiable young teacher asked.

“Sì,” I responded, certain that I wanted whatever this spray of sibilant syllables offered. Then I tracked her outstretched arm as she pointed to the waste basket in the corner.

“Trash,” she said in English.

“Such a lovely word for such an ugly thing!” I exclaimed.

“Bella, sì,” she replied. “Anche molto vecchia.” (Also very old.)

How old? Like many of the words in Italian’s linguistic base---its 10,000 most-used words—spazzare (to sweep) dates back to the fourteenth century, when it appeared in the writings of Italian’s first great narrative stylist, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375). With such a literary pedigree, it's not surprising that trash sounds beautiful in Italian—especially when you’re sweeping it with a rustic handmade twig broom like this one I photographed at a Tuscan villa.

Over the centuries spazzatura sprouted offshoots such as spazzatina, (dusting), spazzola (brush) and spazzolaio (brushmaker). More recent derivatives include spazzamine (mine-sweeper), spazzaneve (snow plough) and my favorite, spazzolino da denti, a toothbrush. But although the word remains the same, spazzatura has taken on forms unimaginable seven centuries ago.

Months ago, when Naples ran out of places to dump or incinerate its garbage, trash piled up in huge, stinking mounds. On the Italian television news, alarmed citizens protested. Health officials sounded warnings. Politicians ranted in outrage. I couldn’t understand much of what the native Neapolitans were saying in their lilting dialect, but one familiar word echoed through every news report: spazzatura.

This medieval word actually inspired a catchy contemporary song, “La Spazzatura,” by Marco Saltatempo. Could lyrics like “Throw out the trash, the trash stinks” (“Butta la spazzatura, puzza la spazzatura”) sound so appealing in any other language?



Sayings and Expressions

“Amore mio, puoi portare fuori la spazzatura?” -- “My love, can you take out the garbage?” (one of the most useful questions I ever learned from a language website)
TV spazzatura – trash TV (used to describe gross reality shows and similar programs)
spazzacamino – chimney sweep
spazzavento – a windswept spot
spazzola da panni – clothes brush
spazzolarsi capelli – to brush one’s hair

Buongiorno! Buonasera! Buonanotte!

Buongiorno! Buonasera! Buonanotte!

Good day! Good evening! Good night!

Time takes different names in Italian. If you want to know the time of day, you ask, “Che ore sono?” (Literally, what are the hours?) If you worry "all the time," you use “il tempo” as in “tutto il tempo.” (Il tempo also means weather so some people may be worrying about il tempo tutto il tempo.) If you do something one time, you say “una volta”; twice, “due volte”, if you do it all at once, it’s “tutto in una volta.” These points of distinction I accept. After all, Italian’s roots date back almost 3,000 years, far too much time for any single word to transmit.

Yet after dozens of trips to Italy, one question continued to confound me: at what hour of the day do you stop saying “buongiorno” (good day) and start using “buonasera” (good evening) or “buonanotte” (good night). In Florence, if I uttered “buongiorno” a minute after noon, people would often respond with “buonasera.” In Rome I kept hearing “buongiorno” well into the afternoon.

I ventured an occasional “buon pomeriggio!” (good afternoon!) but rarely heard an Italian use this greeting. I discovered why in a scholarly linguistic analysis of modern Italian.* Long divided into separate (and often warring) city-states, Italy evolved as a mosaic of regional dialects, each with distinctive sounds, structures and vocabulary. In some places, including Tuscany, the birthplace of Italian, citizens progressed through centuries of days without a pomeriggio (or any other word for afternoon). La mattina (morning) simply blended into la sera (evening) at some unspecified point after midday.

For further clarification I turned to a highly qualified authority: Valeria della Valle, a professor of Italian at Rome’s La Sapienza University and author of both scholarly texts and popular best-sellers on the language. La Professoressa offers this rule of thumb: il buongiorno until lunchtime (likely to be later in Rome than northern cities), la buonasera afterward.

As for buonanotte, save it for your final farewell before heading to bed. And if you want to ensure sogni d’oro (golden dreams), listen to “Buonanotte, buonanotte,” a contemporary ninna nanna (lullaby) sung by the Italian pop legend Mina.



Sayings and Expressions:

Il buon giorno si vede dal mattino -- You can tell by the morning if it’s going to be a good day.

Buonanotte al secchio! -- Literally good night to the bucket, an idiomatic way of dismissing a topic

Buonasera! -- If injected into the middle of a conversation, “good evening” serves as an ironic way of signaling the end of a task or discussion—or of the impossibility of ever sorting out a thorny problem.

*Tosi, Arturo. Language and Society in a Changing Italy. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters, 2001, p. 44.