Eat, Pray, Love

dialect, “France or Spain, as long as I can eat.”
All this internal division meant that Italy never properly coalesced, and Italian didn’t either.
So it’s not surprising that, for centuries, Italians wrote and spoke in local dialects that were
mutually unfathomable. A scientist in Florence could barely communicate with a poet in Sicily
or a merchant in Venice (except in Latin, of course, which was hardly considered the national
language). In the sixteenth century, some Italian intellectuals got together and decided that
this was absurd. This Italian peninsula needed an Italian language, at least in the written form,
which everyone could agree upon. So this gathering of intellectuals proceeded to do
something unprecedented in the history of Europe; they handpicked the most beautiful of all
the local dialects and crowned it Italian.
In order to find the most beautiful dialect ever spoken in Italy, they had to reach back in
time two hundred years to fourteenth-century Florence. What this congress decided would
henceforth be considered proper Italian was the personal language of the great Florentine
poet Dante Alighieri. When Dante published his Divine Comedy back in 1321, detailing a vis-
ionary progression through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, he’d shocked the literate world by not
writing in Latin. He felt that Latin was a corrupted, elitist language, and that the use of it in ser-
ious prose had “turned literature into a harlot” by making universal narrative into something
that could only be bought with money, through the privilege of an aristocratic education. In-
stead, Dante turned back to the streets, picking up the real Florentine language spoken by the
residents of his city (who included such luminous contemporaries as Boccaccio and Petrarch)
and using that language to tell his tale.
He wrote his masterpiece in what he called dolce stil nuovo, the “sweet new style” of the
vernacular, and he shaped that vernacular even as he was writing it, affecting it as personally
as Shakespeare would someday affect Elizabethan English. For a group of nationalist intel-
lectuals much later in history to have sat down and decided that Dante’s Italian would now be
the official language of Italy would be very much as if a group of Oxford dons had sat down
one day in the early nineteenth century and decided that—from this point forward—everybody
in England was going to speak pure Shakespeare. And it actually worked.
The Italian we speak today, therefore, is not Roman or Venetian (though these were the
powerful military and merchant cities) nor even really entirely Florentine. Essentially, it is
Dantean. No other European language has such an artistic pedigree. And perhaps no lan-
guage was ever more perfectly ordained to express human emotions than this four-
teenth-century Florentine Italian, as embellished by one of Western civilization’s greatest po-
ets. Dante wrote his Divine Comedy in terza rima, triple rhyme, a chain of rhymes with each
rhyme repeating three times every five lines, giving his pretty Florentine vernacular what
scholars call “a cascading rhythm”—a rhythm which still lives in the tumbling, poetic cadences