Dianne Hales http://diannehales.com La Passione—How Italy Seduced the World Wed, 13 Nov 2019 15:07:09 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.2.4 http://diannehales.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/xuni-favicon-bird-150x150.jpg Dianne Hales http://diannehales.com 32 32 The Passion that Created the Italian Language http://diannehales.com/the-passion-that-created-the-italian-language/ Wed, 13 Nov 2019 15:07:09 +0000 http://diannehales.com/?p=6201
In the 1500s, an 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 Accademia della Crusca, known as “La Crusca,” the oldest scholarly academy in Europe, 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 food, such as Lievito (yeast or leaven) 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, a shovel-like paddle used to slide loaves of bread from an oven.

Despite their jocularity, La Crusca’s founders 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, significative e dell’uso nostro” (beautiful, noteworthy and of our use) from Italian authors such as Dante, Petrarch 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). 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).

La Crusca’s members always included the great thinkers of the times, such as Galileo Galilei, the father of modern science, who also wrote poetry and learned commentaries. As⁠ foreign powers seized control of Italy, La Crusca, dedicated to a language without a political state, closed down. In 1811 Napoleon Bonaparte, born of Italian parents in Corsica the year after it was annexed by France, reopened La Crusca. The academy flourished once again—until Mussolini’s propaganda machine took over the policing of the language.

La Crusca, which reopened in 1955, maintains its sede, or central seat, in Florence’s elegant Villa Medicea di Castello, a favorite residence of Lorenzo Il Magnifico. Every year it invites distinguished scholars to join its ranks. Among those recently announced is Valeria della Valle, a professor of Italian linguistics at Rome’s Sapienza University, an editor of contemporary Italian dictionaries, the author of best-selling trade books on modern Italian and a collaborator on documentary films with RAI and the Istituto Luce Cinecittà.

Through the years Valeria, my dearest Italian amica, has generously shared her knowledge and insights with me and has contributed immeasurably to my books on Italy and Italian. Her brilliance, generosity and radiant spirit continue to inspire me—and countless others. Complimenti, cara Valeria!

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

Tasting Passion in Italian Wine http://diannehales.com/tasting-passion-in-italian-wine/ Tue, 05 Nov 2019 15:13:49 +0000 http://diannehales.com/?p=6175

The warm days of early November –- known as Indian summer in the United States –- are called “l’estate di San Martino” (the summer of St. Martin) in Italy. Wine producers celebrate the  saint’s feast on November 11 by uncorking the vino novello (new wine) from the recent vendemmia (grape harvest) and getting the first preview of the year’s vintage. As an Italian saying puts it, “Per San Martino, cadono le foglie e si spilla il vino.” (For St. Martin, the leaves fall, and the wine is tapped.)

A few seasons ago my husband and I visited several wineries to find out more about the passion of Italy’s winemakers. At the NostraVita winery in Montalcino in the gorgeous Val d’Orcia, we spent a day with Annibale Parisi, a true Renaissance man. A chemist by training, he has expressed his artistic passions in paintings, collages, sculptures, pipes of wood and cork, and entire rooms of furniture. In his home library, a sculpted wooden “tree” covers a wall with branches holding hand-carved “books” that open—like Joseph Cornell boxes—to reveal leaves, nuts, seeds, nests, and bark from particular trees.

For each of the 5,000 bottles of Brunello wines that NostraVita produces every year, Annibale  hand-paints a unique label. As I watched, he grasped a brush to create an abstract image in four symbolic colors, explaining the meaning of each as he painted: ruddy brown, for the earth; black, for working and “getting your hands dirty”; shimmering white, for the illumination of the sun; and deep red, for passion. And this, he reminds me, regardless of what one makes, is always the most crucial element of all.

We arrived at Poggio Grande  in nearby San Quirico d’Orcia  just as bunches  of freshly picked grapes were going through the first steps of sorting, trimming of stems, and maceration. “We do everything by hand,” said Giulitta Zamperini, the fourth generation of her family to make wines.  She offered us a special treat: glasses of must, the grape juice that will eventually be  transformed into wine, straight from the vat.

At Le Chiuse, an azienda agricola (an estate that grows grapes and produces its own wine) in Montalcino, another family–-Nicolo’ Magnelli, his wife Simonetta and their son Lorenzo–-balances innovation with tradition, including long soaks before and after fermentation in stainless steel vats. The aging process for its signature Brunello continues in barrels for three years until the wine is ready to be poured into bottles and sealed with corks.

At Monte Vibiano Vecchio (above) in Umbria, where my husband and I own a single vine in Vigna Lorenzo, a vineyard that dates back almost 3000 years, I asked my friend Maria Camilla Fasola Bologna what she tastes when she takes a sip of the first vintage:

“With this wine, you know you are drinking a nectar, and inside that nectar is the work of all the people involved in making the wine. There is history. There is tradition. There is love for life, for this beautiful place — a love so deep that it becomes a passion.”



A guest post on LA PASSIONE http://diannehales.com/a-guest-post-on-la-passione/ Tue, 29 Oct 2019 21:38:06 +0000 http://diannehales.com/?p=6143 Because of evacuation from the Sonoma fire zone and widespread power outages in California, I am unable to post an original article this week.  Instead I am sharing a post about my recent presentation of LA PASSIONE in Philadelphia.  Thank you, Gigi, for le belle parole.

by Gigi Simeone, Ph.D.

First would be Bruce Springsteen; then Michelle Obama. But after those two, the person I would most like to be would be Dianne Hales.

Ms. Hales, a journalist who was originally a science writer, found her way to Italy thirty years ago, and fell in love. Returning year after year (sound familiar?), she has published three popular books on her subject, most recently La Passione: How Italy Seduced the World. She writes with unabashed appreciation for all the things that make Italy so special: its food, art, opera, fashion, cinema, and handicrafts, the physical beauty and the warmth of its people.

Dianne is so over-the-top in her enthusiasm for the place (sound familiar?) that she was given an honorary knighthood by the Italian government. So I was delighted to see that she was speaking at the America-Italy Society as part of the annual Ciao Philadelphia festival, a month-long celebration of Italian culture that happens ever October.

After an introduction by Pier Forlano, the Consul General of Italy in Philadelphia, who noted that Italy exceeded all the other countries of the world in its designated 55 UNESCO World Heritage sites, beating out Spain (48), Germany (46), France (45), and the U.S. (24), Ms. Hales gave a wonderful talk and slideshow highlighting all her favorite parts of Italian culture, as she describes them in the book.

After the talk came the opportunity to buy her books and get them signed. Of course, I’d long ago bought and read them all, and had them stashed in my purse, feeling a little like the 8-year-old boy who brings his glove to the ballpark, hoping to catch a foul. But she was very gracious and lovely, and I managed to get through the encounter without blurting out “I want to be you!” Because really, how cool would that be? Exploring Italy for your work, being prominent enough to have entree to behind-the-scenes people and places that regular folks like us don’t have access to. To walk the streets on high alert, with eyes and ears wide open, so as not to miss a nuance of behavior or culture.

Truth be told, that’s what this blog has meant to me, although it is not read by thousands nor will it earn me an honorary knighthood. It forces me out of my skin to look and reflect and interpret, to be mindful and not just sleepwalk my way through experiences. It inspires me to get off my butt and into Philly for the Columbus Day parade, or Brooklyn for the Giglio festival, or  in a few weeks, to Puglia to be a volunteer olive harvester.

That’s more than enough reward for me.

Gigi Simeone is a health sciences and prelaw advisor at Swathmore College. Click here to follow her “Gigi’s Italia” blog.


]]> A Passion for Italian http://diannehales.com/a-passion-for-italian/ Sun, 20 Oct 2019 09:00:47 +0000 http://diannehales.com/?p=6100

This week marks La Settimana della Lingua Italiana net Mondo (Week of the Italian Language in the World),  an annual celebration of  one of Italy’s cultural treasures. No less than Michelangelo’s sculptures, Verdi’s operas, or Fellini’s movies, Italian is an artistic masterwork. While other tongues do little more than speak, this lyrical language thrills the ear, beguiles the mind, captivates the heart, enraptures the soul, and comes closer than any other idiom to expressing the essence of what it means to be human

A decade ago, in the first chapter of La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language, I confessed to being an inammorata, “enchanted by Italian, fascinated by its story and its stories, tantalized by its adventures, addicted to its sound, and ever eager to spend more time in its company.” I still feel this way. Why? Here are just ten of the reasons:

1. No other language is more romantic. All the Romance languages evolved from the volgare (vernacular) of ancient Rome. Yet none may have as many ways of expressing amore as Italian- from “Ti amo, mio tesoro” (I love you, my darling) for l’amore della tua vita (the love of your life) to “Ti voglio bene” for all others.
2. Everything sounds better in Italian. An ordinary towel becomes an asciugamano; a handkerchief, a fazzoletto. Garbage isn’t mere trash — it’s spazzatura.
3. You can use your hands—a lot! In Italian hands become commas, exclamation points, and question marks. Who needs words when a tug at a bottom eyelid translates into “Attenzione!” (“Watch out! Pay attention!”) and a straight line drawn in the air as “Perfetto!”
4. Speaking Italian is almost like singing. The reason: its vigorous vocali (vowels). An Italian “a” slides up from the throat into an ecstatic “aaaah.” Its “e” (pronounced like a hard English “a”) cheers like the hearty “ay” at the end of hip-hip-hooray. The “i” (which sounds like an English “e”) glides with the glee of the double e in bee. The “o” booms like an English “o” on steroids, while the macho “u” sounds deeper and stronger than its English counterpart.
5. Italian may be our universal mother tongue. Dating back almost three millennia, its primal sounds—virtually identical to those that roared through Roman amphitheaters thousands of years ago—strike a chord in our linguistic DNA.
6. When you study Italian, you immerse yourself in a literary masterpiece. None of us can  sculpt like Michelangelo or paint like Leonardo, but we can read and speak a language crafted by 14th-century poets — Dante foremost among them.
7. Italian has become the new French. With only an estimated 60 to 63 million native speakers (compared to a whopping 1.8 billion who claim at least a little English), Italian ranks fourth among the most studied languages in the world—after English, Spanish and French, which Italian now rivals as a language of culture and refinement.
8. Italian is “beautiful, fun and sexy.” That’s how people perceive both Italy and its language, observed Stephen Brockman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, “Why not?” he adds. “I can’t see anything wrong with that.” Neither can I.
9. Italians.The better you know their language, the more you’ll realize how right the British author E.M. Forster was when he advised: “Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvelous than the land.” I couldn’t agree more.
10. An Italian edition of my biography of the language: LA BELLA LINGUA: La mia storia d’amore con l’italiano, just published by Treccani.   

If you live in or near Philadelphia or New York City please join us in celebrating LA PASSIONE, my most recent book, and this special week:

Monday, October 21, 6:00 p.m.
Ciao Philadelphia! and the America-Italy Society of Philadelphia
230 South Broad Street, Suite 1105
Philadelphia, PA

Friday, October 25, 6:30 p.m.
Italian American Committee on Education (IACE) and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura (Italian Cultural Institute)
686 Park Ave
New York, NY
RSVP: info@iacelanguage.org

Viva l’italiano!


10 Reasons to Celebrate Italy’s Cultural Heritage http://diannehales.com/10-reasons-to-celebrate-italys-cultural-heritage-2/ Sun, 13 Oct 2019 15:31:18 +0000 http://diannehales.com/?p=6097

Every October the United States celebrates Italian heritage month. The 26 million Americans of Italian descent make up the fifth largest ethnic group in the United States. However, we all have many reasons to celebrate the best of Italian culture, including the following:

1. Italians defined art and architecture. More than half of the world’s designated cultural treasures reside within Italy’s borders.

2. Italians created the first universities, law and medical schools, banks and public libraries.

3. Italian scholars and writers produced the first modern histories, satires, sonnets and travelogues.

4. Italian wordsmiths created la bella lingua by crafting the effervescent Tuscan vernacular into a language so rich and powerful that, as Dante demonstrated in his Divine Comedy, it can sweep readers down to hell and up to heaven.

5. Italian musicians fashioned the original do-re-mi of musical notation, instruments such as the oboe, piano and violin and the language of music (il linguaggio della musica) with terms such as adagio, allegro, aria, concerto, soprano and libretto.

6. Through the influence of books such as Machiavelli’s The Prince and Castiglione’s The Courtier, Italy taught diplomacy and etiquette to Europe.

7. Italian scientists mapped the moon in the 1600s, split the atom and invented the battery, barometer, radio, telephone and thermometer.

8. Italian designers, beginning in the Renaissance, raised fashion to an art. Today designer clothes by Armani, Versace and Prada appear on runways and red carpets around the globe.

9. An Italian patented the first cinematografo—a machine that recorded, developed and projected films—and invented the forerunner of all panoramic projectors.

10. Italians created the cuisine that the world loves best. Pasta, with pizza a close second, has conquered more people in more countries than any dish from any other country.

How did a boot-shaped peninsula smaller than California make so many enduring contributions to Western culture? In his fascinating  book, Italianità: The Essence of Being Italian and Italian-American, William Giovinazzo suggests that the answer lies within the Italian soul:

“How could Italians have produced the art that we have created had we not been consumed with the beauty that surrounds us? If we had not been in awe of the majesty of the divine? How could we have written the poetry and literature had we not burned with the revelations that could inspire others? How could we have given birth to a culinary tradition that has conquered the world had we not found delight in even the most common of meals shared with friends and family? How could we have composed the music and operas had we not wished to stir hearts with this joy?”


La Bella Lingua in Italian http://diannehales.com/la-bella-lingua-in-italian/ Mon, 07 Oct 2019 16:32:16 +0000 http://diannehales.com/?p=6086

They said it couldn’t be done:  There was no way to translate LA BELLA LINGUA into Italian. Too many idioms and colloquial expressions. Too much slang.  Untranslatable words in both languages. However, the distinguished Italian publisher Treccani has done the seemingly impossible and produced an Italian translation. Copies of LA BELLA LINGUA: La mia storia d’amore con l’italiano are available at amazon.it, IBS internet bookshop, and some independent bookstores in the United States, including my favorite Italian local and online bookstore,  San Francisco’s Libreria Pino.

Here is a translation of the Treccani catalog description for its Italian edition of LA BELLA LINGUA:

“When I arrived in Italy for the first time, in 1983, I could say only one sentence: I don’t speak Italian.” Thus begins, almost like a cliché, the love story of Dianne Hales with our country. Since then the American journalist has studied the language in every possible way, but above all she has lived in places, come to know people and explored art, music, literature, cinema, dialects and lifestyles.  Offering new insights to curious travelers, La Bella Lingua presents a point of view that is not obvious and never banal, even to those who were born and raised in Italy.

Coming next year:  translations of  LA PASSIONE into Bulgarian and Chinese and of LA BELLA LINGUA  into Chinese.

October marks Italian Heritage Month, and I’m happy to join in honoring Italy’s many contributions to our culture.  I’m particularly grateful to Linda Binkley of  the Italian American Heritage Foundation, who dedicated part of her summer to reading and reviewing my books for its members.

“Italians are driven by passion…passion which blossoms into the most wonderous creations,” she wrote, describing LA PASSIONE  as “a palette upon which the cultural history of Italy comes to life… a marvelously entertaining and enlightening read. The writing is infused with lively historical anecdotes, lots of humor and of course, passion!”

As part of celebrations of Italy’s culture and language, I will be presenting LA PASSIONE at public events on the East Coast in Philadelphia and New York.  Please join us:

Monday, October 21, 6:00 p.m.
Ciao Philadelphia!  and the America-Italy Society of Philadelphia
230 South Broad Street, Suite 1105
Philadelphia, PA

Friday, October 25, 6:00 p.m.
686 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10065.
RSVP:  info@iacelanguage.org

Finally, a shout-out to the wonderful members of the Century Club, San Francisco’s  historic women’s club, for their gracious hospitality and warm reception.   Grazie mille!


Honorng the Passion of Italy’s Patron Saint http://diannehales.com/honorng-the-passion-of-italys-patron-saint/ Tue, 01 Oct 2019 16:33:37 +0000 http://diannehales.com/?p=6041

October 4 marks the feast of St. Francis, born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone in 1182, the son of a prosperous textile merchant in Assisi.  The ringleader of a band of hard-drinking, carousing young men who delighted “in practical jokes, in pranks, in tomfoolery, in idle talk and gossip,” as his first biographer put it, seemed an unlikely candidate to become Italy’s patron saint.

When Perugia and Assisi faced off in one of their frequent clashes, the twenty-year-old playboy, yearning for chivalric glory, volunteered for the fray. Captured by enemy troops, Francesco was tossed into a squalid underground cell in Perugia for a year before his father could arrange a ransom.

The traumatic experience shattered his health and transformed the callow youth. Francesco went off to meditate and pray in the dilapidated chapel of San Damiano in Assisi. One day he heard the figure of Christ on the crucifix above the altar instruct him to “repair my house, which you see is in ruins.”

Francesco, taking the instructions literally, hauled bales of precious cloth from his father’s shop to a nearby market town to sell and tried to give the proceeds to the pastor. His incensed father charged his son with theft. At a public hearing, Francesco turned over the money—along with every stitch of clothing he was wearing. As the naked youth explained, from that moment he had only a heavenly father.

Francesco also took a “bride,” Lady Poverty, and called himself Poverello (Poor Little One). Renouncing all earthly possessions, he formed a band of “begging brothers,” who preached a gospel of love and peace. Even animals responded to Francesco’s empathy. Once  he approached a fearsome wolf terrorizing the town of Gubbio. When the beast lunged at him, Francesco entreated him not to eat “Brother Ass” (as he referred to his body). The wolf, curling up at his feet, wordlessly conveyed a promise not to attack the townspeople, who provided food for the animal at the gates of their city for the rest of its life.

Despite debilitating illnesses, Francesco delighted in being a child of the universe. His rapturous Canticle of the Creatures praises with unbridled wonder Master Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Sister Water, and Brother Fire. Francesco’s lyrical verses transformed his spiritual passion into the first major literary work in the still-evolving Italian language.

Francesco’s health deteriorated over two decades of preaching and fasting. At age 44, emaciated and racked with pain, he lay dying. Those keeping vigil reported that at the moment of Francesco’s death, larks sang and flew in circles above his beloved humble church,  the Porziuncola. This chapel, infused with centuries of heartfelt pleas, remains one of my favorite places to kneel and reflect.

“Your prayers will be answered,” a kindly friar told me on my most recent visit.

“I hope so,” I replied.

“I know,” he said, explaining that when God asked what he would like in return for his devoted service, Francesco requested only that those who come to this chapel and “pray with a devout heart will obtain what they ask.” My prayers for a friend with breast cancer were indeed answered—for which I remain grateful to St. Francis, God, and the state-of-the-science care she received.


Venice’s Passion for Lace http://diannehales.com/venices-passion-for-lace/ Wed, 25 Sep 2019 15:14:25 +0000 http://diannehales.com/?p=6039

In the early fifteenth century, a Venetian sailor wanted to bring his fiancée a souvenir of his exotic voyages. Too poor to afford a proper gift, he plucked a ruffled sea plant called Halimeda opuntia from the waters off Greece and carried it home to the island of Burano in the Venice lagoon.

His beloved, enchanted by the algae’s scalloped edges and raised furls, fretted that the memento would soon disintegrate. Determined to create something that would last as long as their love, she picked up a needle used to mend fishing nets. Plying white thread into intricate patterns, she replicated the delicate whorls. The stunning result was “mermaid’s lace,” an ingenious design that helped launch Burano’s lace-making industry.

With this tale in A Beautiful Woman in Venice, Kathleen Gonzalez, a sister appassionata, tugged me into a world woven of fiber, air, and passion. For centuries, Venetian lace, gossamer as a spider’s web, represented absolute luxury. A single piece required weeks or months of eye-straining labor. Yet other than accenting regal robes, adorning ladies’ bosoms, or trimming clerical vestments, it served no practical function. Like the filigreed glass from its sister island of Murano, no one needed Burano’s lace—but everyone wanted it. For his coronation, Louis XIV commissioned a collar that took two years to stitch and cost hundreds of times its weight in gold.

The opulent age of lace and luxury ended with the political upheavals that overthrew the French monarchy in the 1790s and rocked Europe for decades. The market for Venice’s delicate handiwork all but disappeared. Then came the disastrous winter of 1871. Temperatures plummeted so low that the lagoon froze over. With their boats trapped in ice, Burano’s fishermen couldn’t leave the harbor. Without a daily catch, its residents began to starve. Italians in the recently unified nation organized benefits to raise money for desperately needed supplies.

The islanders survived the deep freeze, but Italy’s Parliament sought a long-term solution for their precarious finances. The brightest hope seemed Burano’s famed needlework, but the lace industry had become, as one observer put it, “a very dead Lazarus.”

A countess and a princess headed a campaign to resurrect it. Ultimately Burano’s fate rested on its last lace maker, an illiterate septuagenarian known as Cencia Scarpariola. Although she could not write her own name, Cencia was a living encyclopedia of knots, twirls, loops, and patterns—secrets in danger of dying with her.

The mistress of the girls’ school in Burano became Cencia’s sole apprentice. Under the old woman’s tutelage, the teacher turned student mastered every detail of the painstaking process of weaving a fantasy in thread. In 1872, the Scuola dei Merletti (Embroidery School) of Burano, housed in the former governor’s palazzo, admitted its first eight students. Stitch by stitch, its passionate lace makers brought the island back to life.

The industry survived two world wars and a global depression. But it could not withstand a flood of cheap imported lace in the 1960s. The Burano lace-making school closed, only to reopen in 1981. Although far fewer locals make their living from lace, tourists still throng the island’s shops to take home with them, like the long-ago Venetian sailor, a delicate memento of the marvels they have seen.


Italy’s Passion for Food http://diannehales.com/italys-passion-for-food/ Mon, 16 Sep 2019 19:17:41 +0000 http://diannehales.com/?p=6035

A passion for food merits a precise word in Italian: golosità (from gola, for throat), which goes beyond appetite, craving, gluttony, or hunger. Friends proudly declare themselves “golosi,” often for a dish made only in their hometowns, only with local ingredients, only with a recipe handed down from a great-grandmother to a grandmother to a mother.

Michelangelo was goloso for a favorite of the stonecutters of Carrara called lardo, the subcutaneous fat layer of a pig’s abdomen—salted, aromatized, spiced, aged in marble for six to twelve months, and melted over hot bread. The composer Gioacchino Rossini, a sophisticated gourmand, inspired—and enthusiastically consumed—various recipes alla Rossini, such as cannelloni made with a rich mix of veal, butter, cream, béchamel, and Parmesan. “Appetite is to the stomach,” he wrote, “what love is to the heart.”

When not preparing or consuming meals, Italians are talking about food. In decades of eavesdropping, I’ve listened to Italians, who can taste the sun in Sicilian tomatoes and the wind in Ligurian olive oil, expound on what they are eating, are thinking about eating, have eaten, might eat, will eat, would rather eat, wish they had eaten, or eat only the way Mamma makes it.

Why does food so enrapture Italians? Quite simply, because it matters—not just nutritionally but historically, culturally, and emotionally. In Italy, eating does more than sustain life: it embellishes daily existence.

Flavors cajole the taste buds. Textures caress the tongue. The soft center of a pagnotta (a round loaf of bread) feels like a puff of cloud in your mouth. The sound of a Florentine bistecca sizzling on the grill tingles the ears. The plate itself poses like an edible still life. Anche l’occhio vuole la sua parte, Italians exclaim. The eye also wants its part, its share of delight.

The primal passions of eros and food, libido and appetite, intertwine like lovers, blurring the border between one carnal desire and another. As a cooking instructor once pointed out to our class, eating induces sensations similar to those of sex. Blood races through the veins. Cheeks turn rosy. A satisfying warmth lingers after we indulge. Not surprisingly, Italy gave rise to the Slow Food movement, which encourages the sensual savoring of authentic flavors.

To Italians who truly appreciate food, “a successful dish is a pleasure superior to erotic bliss,” writes Elena Kostioukovitch in Why Italians Love to Talk About Food, “a sublime joy that . . . elevates existence to a height beyond which there is nothing more to be desired.” The Italian table serves as a stage for human drama. Here people connect, reveal themselves, share pleasure, satisfy curiosity, experiment, and indulge.

Eating itself can become a sensuous spectacle. The most erotic public act she ever witnessed, a friend recounts, was a Venetian man guzzling oysters, with darting tongue, noisy sucking sounds, and juice dripping from his lips. Casanova reportedly enjoyed licking the mollusks from a woman’s breasts. For those who prefer a non-X-rated example, think of Disney’s Lady and her Tramp, slurping their way to a first kiss from opposite ends of a strand of spaghetti.



Are We Like the Ancient Romans? http://diannehales.com/are-we-like-the-ancient-romans/ Wed, 11 Sep 2019 04:56:09 +0000 http://diannehales.com/?p=6024

“Sniff!” our guide commands as she thrusts a leaf snipped from a bush in the Roman Forum under my nose. “What do you smell?”

I inhale deeply. The aroma is tantalizingly familiar—fresh, spicy, woodsy, a scent I immediately link to a certain type of alpha male—but I can’t identify its name.

“Glory!” she exclaims.

Wreaths woven of such laurel leaves once crowned Rome’s conquering generals as they rode in triumph behind twelve attendants bearing fasces, the long rods and ax symbolizing power over life and death. At their sides, a slave repeatedly whispered, “Memento mori,” a reminder that despite the adulation they remained mortal, destined to die. Yet for the moment they could bask in the honor of extending the rule of Rome, described by the writer Pliny as a gift “bestowed upon the human race like a second source of light.”

On a soft September night, the glories of Rome surround me like the stage set of a majestic historical drama. Jagged columns jut toward the stars. Triumphal arches, pocked by time and thieves, gleam in floodlights. All testify to a long-lost time when every road led to Rome and every nation bowed under its command.

“Were they like us?” I wonder aloud as I survey the still-glorious remnants of the ancient Romans. Our guide suggests a more salient question: “Are we like them?”

Not at first glance. Rome’s was a pagan creed, with a bloodlust that ran deep. Honed into an invincible killing machine, its legions enslaved millions and lined miles of roads with the crucified bodies of enemies. Its citizen-soldiers killed without compunction—and faced the prospect of being killed without complaint.

Even in their private lives, Romans didn’t shy away from brutality. Crowds cheered as wild beasts mauled each other and gladiators fought to the death. Violence permeated homes as well as arenas. By law a Roman patriarch could kill an unwanted or sickly newborn, a disrespectful slave, or a wife who committed adultery or aborted a child without his consent.

Although the Roman Empire would ultimately crumble and fall, the passion of its citizens entered the spiritual DNA of their descendants and spread beyond geopolitical borders. Even twenty-some centuries later, people around the world still do as the ancient Romans once did.

We prize our families and honor our dead. We take for granted creature comforts that the Romans invented, such as indoor plumbing and heated water. We call the months of the year and the planets by their Roman names. We soothe ourselves with music, soak in warm baths, wildly cheer our favorite teams, sip wine, linger over delicious dinners, and laugh at bawdy comics and clowns. Like the Romans, we garb ourselves in stylish clothes, fancy footwear, and statement jewelry. Modern women experiment with hairstyles (including hair extensions and wigs), fight wrinkles, and apply makeup that is thankfully far less noxious than the “mascara” of ground-up roasted ants favored by Rome’s beauties. Men still try to conceal their baldness, but more subtly than with the lampblack their Roman counterparts applied to their scalps (a ruse that worked only across the vast Circus Maximus).

In our pursuit of romance and happiness, observes Alberto Angela, the archaeologist and author of Amore e sesso nell’antica Roma (Love and Sex in Ancient Rome), contemporary men and women may be more similar to the ancient Romans than any prior generation. “No other civilization or culture of past or of recent centuries,” he contends, “has ever been closer to them in terms of daily life, love, and sex.”
