INTRODUCTION
CONFESSIONS OF AN APPASSIONATA
In the gleaming kitchen of her culinary academy in Florence, I ask an architect-turned-chef-turned-restaurateur about the passions that changed her life: How did she know that she was choosing the right one to follow?
She sighs. “Ah, signora, we do not choose our passion. Passion chooses us.”
I understand. Italy chose me.
More than thirty years ago, shivering in a frigid Swiss station after a talk in Gstaad, I impetuously switched trains and headed south to a sun-kissed country I’d never visited. I had no reservations, no itinerary, no inkling of what I might discover. The last thing I expected was to fall in love—but I did.
Day by day, sometimes hour by hour, Italy seduced me with tastes, sounds, scents, and sensations I’d never encountered before. With every morsel and marvel, I yearned for more. I was far from the first person to succumb to Italy’s charms. Countless others have swooned for its food, wine, incomparable art, or breathtaking scenery—as will many more in the centuries to come.
I fell for the Italians. Old and young, flirtatious men and gracious women, they drew me in, not just with their easy smiles and effortless charm, but with a magnetic intensity that pulled me ever closer. With scarcely a shred of their language, I yearned to communicate with these intriguing strangers—“more marvelous than the land,” as the British author E. M. Forster so aptly said.
At the least, I longed to decipher the tsunami of words that washed over me on that first semisilent journey. After I returned to the United States, I immersed myself in Italian classes, movies, and conversation groups. My linguistic infatuation eventually inspired a book, La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language.
Kindred Italophiles embraced my labor of love, which garnered a spot on the New York Times’ bestseller list and won for me the great honor of an Italian knighthood, with the title of Cavaliere dell’Ordine della Stella della Solidarietà Italiana (Knight of the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity). Yet even after La Bella Lingua’s success, Italy didn’t loosen its grip on me.
Through Italian friends and friends of friends, I became captivated by the real woman immortalized by Leonardo in his Mona Lisa. Over the course of several years, I walked the streets in Florence where she lived, knelt in the chapel where she prayed, ventured into the long-abandoned convent where she died—and wrote Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered. It too found a warm welcome among lovers of art, Italy, or both.
“So are you done with Italy?” asked a man at one of my readings.
“God, no!” I exclaimed. He was asking the wrong question, just as I had done in Florence. The very notion seemed unthinkable—and impossible. Italy wasn’t done with me.
AT FIRST, ITALY’S SYMPHONY of chaos had simply swept over me. Every time I emerged from a train station—in Milan, Florence, Venice, Rome—I longed for more eyes to see, more ears to listen, more neurons to process the sensations bombarding me. As I returned year after year, Italy tugged me deeper into its explosive energy. Passion poured into my soul like a river.
Dianne—wife, mother, journalist, serious and sensible—morphed into Diana, dancing barefoot under the Tuscan moon and delighting in everything from fresh-fried fiori di zucca (zucchini flowers) to tart and tingly limoncello. Without realizing exactly how, I became appassionata, a word that dates back to the fourteenth century and translates as “taken by passion.” I didn’t fight this sweet seduction. I indulged it, embraced it, delighted in it.
When I described my quasi obsession to a sophisticated Roman, she pegged it immediately as una passione italiana. “There are two types,” she said with the seen-done-tried-that worldliness of the Eternal City. “There is the passion that you take to bed, but beyond children, what does it get you? Then there are the passions that create something, that take you beyond yourself and outlast you.”
I chose to pursue the latter—on my own or with my often-bemused but endlessly supportive husband. Searching for the sources and secrets of la passione italiana became my passion. I pursued its trail north to the Dolomites and south to Sicily, from Sardinia’s rugged western coast to Venice’s labyrinth of canals. As I homed in on specific passions, I visited Florence for its art, Rome for its antiquities, Assisi for its saints, Piedmont for its wines, Milan for its fashion, Emilia-Romagna for its food and fast cars.
Every destination led to a dozen detours, each one a revelation. I trekked through pagan temples, ancient ruins, medieval chapels, glass furnaces, silk mills, fashion salons, restaurants, workshops, studios, concert halls, street markets, vineyards, wine cellars, olive groves, movie sets, and museums of every ilk. Back in the United States, I devoured histories, biographies, memoirs, diaries, novels, poems, and travelogues.
I focused on the passions that have left indelible fingerprints on culture, but to a great extent, the ones in this book, just like other passions, chose me. What intrigued me most were the stories of passionate Italians—famous, unknown, legendary, actual, historical, contemporary. You will meet many in these pages. Yet every profile is a mere “for instance,” with a dozen alternatives that I could have included instead.
La Passione, a portrait more of a spirit than a nation, reflects my experiences as an outsider, an explorer, and an unabashed donna sedotta. This phrase literally translates as a “seduced woman” and usually refers to someone who’s been led astray. You could say that Italy has had its way with me, but I’ve been a willing, enthusiastic partner.
Italians, born to the peal of church bells and the bite of pasta al dente (literally, “to the tooth”), inhabit a more complex and confounding country than the one I’ve come to love. But my perspective enables me to notice what they may take for granted. In Parma, at the end of an interview with a young man named Stefano in—of all places—his family’s prosciutto processing plant, my guide, who had been listening from a few feet away, walked over and hugged me. A bit taken aback by this unexpected gesture, I looked at him quizzically.
“La nostra bellezza!” (Our beauty!), he exclaimed. “You have seen what we cannot see because we live inside it. The things we Italians do—yes, it’s work, but you realize that what gives it meaning is passion. You didn’t ask Stefano what he does but what it means to him. And maybe for the first time in his life, he recognized that what he feels for this place, for this work, is passion.”
MOST OF THE TIME, I was the one experiencing an epiphany. In an archaeology archive in Rome, I cradled the oldest objects I’d ever touched—shards of vases and statues dating back almost three thousand years—and appreciated as never before the ancient roots of la passione italiana. In a rustic chapel encased within a grand cathedral in Assisi, I felt the sacred passion that had inspired an infinity of prayers. In a “piazza,” the unofficial name for a sprawling glassmaking furnace room, on a Venetian island, I watched maestri use centuries-old techniques to capture a timeless passion for beauty in a vase as exquisite as any of the flowers it would ever hold.
At every stop, I tasted scrumptious foods and sipped robust wines that could only be produced with Italian passion. I heard music and watched films that took me inside this ephemeral force. Most of all I talked with Italians—artists and artisans, chefs and vintners, historians and film directors. And wherever I went, I continued to be surprised—and seduced.
Crisscrossing Italy over the last few years, I’ve spent hours in airports. In several I came across grand pianos—at first, I assumed only for display. Then I read the sign perched atop one: SUONAMI! (Play me!). Passengers, pausing as they slogged to and from airline gates, did just that.
While waiting for a flight from Rome to Palermo, I listened to a young girl tentatively finger the melody of “Volare.” Two teenagers giggled through a fast-paced pop song. Then a wiry, curly-haired man in his thirties stopped, took off his jacket, sat down, and launched into a sonata that stopped passersby in their tracks. Eyes closed, fingers never slowing, oblivious to flight announcements and the gathering crowd, he played with utter concentration, his music echoing through the crowded terminal.
I didn’t recognize the piece, but I knew what I was hearing: una passione italiana.