My Love Affair With Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language, By Dianne Hales
(Broadway Books; 301 pages; $24.95)

An economic crisis has a way of curbing one’s ability to rent a Tuscan villa for the summer, but, thankfully, there are other, more affordable means to indulge a passion for all things Italian. Among them: getting a copy of Dianne Hales’ wonderful new book, “La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair With Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language.”

Hales, who lives in Marin County, has written more than a simple guidebook about the language she came to cherish over many visits to Italy. In lively, self-deprecating prose, this “sensible woman of sturdy Polish peasant stock,” as she describes herself, charts her progress in learning “the world’s most luscious language.” “Italians,” she writes, “say that someone who acquires a new language ‘possesses’ it. In my case, Italian possesses me.”

Hales also shows how the language’s evolution has been closely linked to the development of the Italian state. Dante Alighieri, the medieval poet who wrote “The Divine Comedy,” may have done more than any one person to spur the growth of Italian, but many readers will be surprised to learn that as recently as the early 20th century, “most Italians spoke in dialect; many were illiterate. Italiano standard remained the language of the privileged, the politicians, and the priests.” It was a new art form, Hales asserts, that united citizens: “Millions of Italians learned how to speak the national language at the movies.”
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