La Bella Lingua:

My Love Affair with Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language

Centuries before there was an Italy, there was Italian. Its roots date back thousands of years to the volgare, the street Latin of ancient Rome. La Bella Lingua tells the adventurous tale of how this zesty language became Italian and follows its path through the realms of history, art, literature, manners, music, cooking, cinema and, of course, amore.

Handcrafted by poets and wordsmiths, Italian embodies its native speakers’ greatest genius: the ability to transform anything—from marble to melody, from the humble noodle to life itself—into a joyous art. While other tongues do little more than speak, Italian 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.

For years I was told that La Bella Lingua couldn’t be translated  because of its many idioms and colloquial expressions.  However, the distinguished Italian publisher Treccani has done the seemingly impossible and produced an Italian translation by Maria Baiocchi and Anna Tagliavini. La Bella Lingua: La mia storia d’amore con l’italiano is available at amazon.it, IBS internet bookshop, and some independent bookstores in the United States, including San Francisco’s Libreria Pino.

At its official presentation in Rome,  Massimo Bray, direttore generale of Treccani,  described La Bella Lingua as “un libro importante per diffondere l’interesse e l’amore per la lingua italiana” (an important book for spreading interest and love for the Italian language). An Italian reviewer,  Professore Pasquale D’Ascola, praised the book as “elegante e snello, così valentino, denso di sapere, di studio e di amore per l’italiano e per i native” (elegant and graceful, like a Valentine, full of knowledge, of study and of love for Italian and for its natives).

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