An Irish Diary

Lingering on the Lingo – In pursuit of Italian fluency, Frank McNally takes a roundabout route to Rome

“I was in Bologna, strolling a medieval street called the Via Malcontenti”

Frank McNally's face
Frank McNally
Tue Feb 26 2019 - 18:29

By the time I got around to booking, the cheapest flights to Italy for the rugby weekend were inbound to Venice, last Friday, and outbound on Monday from Milan. So making a virtue of inconvenience, and spending the same amount overall, I turned the trip into a mini InterRail tour, visiting four cities in three days.

Rugby aside, there was a secondary motivation: to try out my Duolingo Italian course, now seven weeks old.

Exposing my vocabulary to a variety of accents would be a test. But I was encouraged by the constant positivity from my online app, which every day since New Year’s Day had sent me a flame-emoji and the message “You’re killing it”, while reminding me to log in for my daily lesson.

I now realise that what I had been killing was the language itself.

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Certainly, my 55-day slaughter campaign did not seem to impress any actual Italians. Even when they knew what I was asking, they almost always answered me in English.

And mostly I didn’t get that far.

Despite carrying a copy of La Gazzetta dello Sport, trying to look bored, and not taking pictures of food, I was usually addressed in English before opening my mouth. You don't have to kill it on such occasions. The phrase you were mentally practising dies prenatally, of natural causes.

This wasn’t all me, I’m sure. The march of English as the global language is unstoppable: everyone you meet now seems to speak it.

And in fact, my beginner’s Italian did produce one notable triumph, although that was also depressing, in two different ways.

It happened in Venice, where I spent a pleasant Friday night strolling the maze of back streets, aimlessly. When the day-trippers are gone, especially in February, you can still seem to have the city to yourself.

So I was ambling through yet another deserted picture-postcard view when, not for the first time, I had to side-step dog droppings.

In this case, it was an unusually substantial consignment, and somebody had stuck a newspaper to it, with the message scrawled in large letters: “Io sono un cane. Il mio padrone è una merda.”

There was one word there that somehow hasn’t yet featured on my Duolingo course. But thanks to French, and the context, I guessed its meaning. Hence my grim triumph in being able to translate the phrase: “I am a dog. My owner is a shit.”

Hence also a dispiriting insight into the plight of being a local anywhere, even Venice. You may be lucky enough to own an apartment here, and yet there will still be small things that oppress you.

Alas for the human condition.

Twenty-four hours later, in not dissimilar vein, I was in Bologna, strolling a medieval street called the Via Malcontenti.

There are two versions of how this name arose. One is that the original Malcontents were a family of that surname. The other is that this was the route along which prisoners were once led to execution.

Judging by the amount of another great Italian word on display – graffiti – there are are plenty of malcontents in Bologna still. But it’s also a charming city, full of old architecture and young students. Having hosted a university since 1088, it is Europe’s original college town, where Dante and Boccaccio used to hang out. And you can still somehow feel the buzz of learning everywhere. Either that or it was Duolingo nagging me to log in.

On my only previous visit to Bologna, a brief stopover on an actual InterRail trip in 1986, I had not made it beyond the train station. The city was known as “Red Bologna” then, being a communist stronghold. But my only memory of that visit is of our group trying the negotiate the use of the station toilets, which were guarded by a fiercely capitalist cleaning lady, who would not let us past without payment of a bourgeois fee in lira.

I can’t recall being aware then, and was astonished to need reminding now, that the same station had been the scene only a few summers earlier of Italy’s worst postwar atrocity. That was in 1980, when neo-fascists bombed a crowded waiting room. Eighty-five people died.

Italy has its political problems still, I know. Some of them have been caused by EU membership and by the currency that replaced the Lira.

Even so, it’s useful to reflect that, in the lifetimes of some of us who don’t consider ourselves old, it was still fighting the second World War.

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