Everything Is Beautiful

Well, not quite everything, because in Italian what’s bello isn’t always beautiful

Sonnino, one of my ancestral towns. Che bella! Photo mine.

Cari amici,

When I was visiting family in Campania a few weeks ago, I learned a new expression to use when ending a conversation: tante belle cose. I don’t hear it in central Italy and can’t remember hearing it on my northern travels (though the internet tells me it’s used in Piemonte), but apparently it’s commonly used in southern Italy. I love it and am trying to get in the habit of using it—after all, is there a sweeter way to say farewell than by wishing someone many beautiful things?

The phrase got me thinking about the prevalence, and many meanings, of the Italian word bello (in all its various modifications). I find its frequent use fascinating given the historically hard life of many Italians, especially those whose poverty drove them out of Italy during the Great Migration of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As Joseph Luzzi puts it in My Two Italies, the south (or at least Calabria, where his family is from) has “an untranslatable worldview called la miseria, ‘the misery,’ a pervasive belief born of poverty that things will go worse than you expect them to and that fate is not your friend.” But then Italians are surrounded by beauty in various forms—nature, architecture, and fine art—so it’s a logical gift to wish upon others. And to me it’s what I’ll call a reflective behavior, one that indicates a kind of inner beauty.

The key word in tante belle cose is, of course, belle, the feminine plural of the word meaning pretty or beautiful. But bello is tricky. Sometimes it doesn’t mean pretty or beautiful. Depending on the context, it can mean good or nice or quite, or even enhance a negative meaning. You’ve gotta love a language that uses a typically positive or praising word to demonstrate just how awful something is.

Let’s look at some examples.

• Quanto è bello vederti! (It’s nice/wonderful/great/lovely to see you!)

• È stato un bel disastro. (It was a real disaster.)

• Ho una bella fame! (I’m not just hungry, I’m starving!)

• Mi sono svegliata nel bel mezzo della notte. (In the middle of the night. Seriously.)

• Un bel po’ (Though un po’ means a little, un bel po’ means quite a bit.)

You know I always have to shove some grammar down your throat, so let’s look at how bello functions when it comes before instead of after a noun. In its masculine forms, it’s a bit of a changeling. (Not so with feminine nouns: una bella chiesa, una chiesa bella; due belle bambine, due bambine belle, and so on. Very regular.)

What about those changelings, though? Let’s say you see a beautiful dog. You could say Che cane bello! to its owner. But if instead you put the adjective before the noun, you’d say Che bel cane! (The dog = il cane; bel takes the same form as il). If you want to admire some books instead, you’d say i libri belli or, with the adjective coming before the noun, i bei libri. (The books = i libri; bei takes the same form as i). How about some good friends? Che amici belli, but also che begli amici. (The friends = gli amici; begli takes the same form as gli.) .

Okay, okay, enough grammar for now. There’s another delightful aspect of bello usage that I want to tell you about, a really lovely way of asking where you went or what you did. Italians don’t ask you simply where or what, but where or what di bello. Dove sei andato di bello? Che cosa hai fatto di bello? What beautiful place did you go to, or what beautiful thing did you do?

The meaning doesn’t change—they are asking where you went or what you did, but by tacking on di bello they’re suggesting that there must have been something beautiful (or fun, wonderful, etc.) about whatever you’re about to tell them. And to me that’s, well, beautiful. I see it as another reflection, this one of a mindset about how we exist and function in the world.

Maybe everything really is beautiful in Italian. So tell me, what did you do this week that was bello? I can speak for some of you who recently pledged financial support for “Italicus.” Your thoughtfulness and generosity means so much to me. Thank you.

Tante belle cose. Alla prossima—

Cheryl

P.S. My book! Which you can buy here or on the usual sites, or, better yet, order if from you local bookstore. Another fab option is to ask your library to stock it. If you read it and like it, please tell your friends and/or leave a few lines of praise on any bookish site. You’d be surprised how much a rating or review helps authors. Baci!