One
A Proverb to Decipher
The tale recounted in this book has its origins in an enigmatic proverb whose meaning awaits decipherment.
Al contadino non far sapere quanto è buono il formaggio con le pere: Do not let the peasant know how good cheese is with pears. This proverb is widely known in many regions of Italy with minor variations (come è buono for quanto è buono) and dialectal changes that designate one or the other subject by its local term (cacio for formaggio). My interest in this topic, which has captured my attention for some time, resides in the difficulty in deciphering the contradictory nature that appears to characterize it.
Mottos, maxims, and aphorisms arise out of meditations on the meaning of life, on the behavior suitable for this or that occasion, on solutions to pragmatic problems of survival and cohabitation. They are “help that one man offers another,” writes Giuseppe Pontiggia, “a guide to avoiding error or providing a remedy for it, the comfort that experience can give someone who has not yet faced it.” With regard to “authorial” advice, so abundant in the literary tradition, the characteristic of proverbial discourse is its anonymity, its presentation as “speech without a speaker” (in Michael Camille’s definition), the fruit of collective wisdom handed down anonymously and impersonally. In this way, proverbs are stratified over time to the point of becoming in the oral culture “the equivalent of auctoritates in the world of letters.” As Piero Camporesi writes, in an illiterate world such as the peasant’s, “the proverb consolidates the unattributed wisdom of the group,” even if, as is not uncommon, the origin of a proverb can arise out of a signed text, reworked as a literary quotation.
Proverbs are often focused on the relations between humans, animals, weather, and seasons. Based on the “statistical calculation of probabilities,” they are geared toward “the resolution of needs and practical problems,” such as how to execute a piece of work in the right way, how to assure a good harvest, how to maintain good health. Equally important are reminders of duty, honesty, and moral exactitude—and also the need, at times, for cunning and self-interest—which establish and transmit “perceptions of the nature of life,” as Terence Scully says. Advice and observations born of experience alternate with conventional wisdom shared by all, which lightens the discourse and facilitates communication. Equally important is the role of entertainment and socializing, assured by the irony and playfulness that are common to proverbs.
Today as in the past, food is a frequent element in the proverbial discourse. A recent collection of sayings about food, Detti del mangiare , lists 1,738 of them in Italy, all confirmed in present-day use in various dialectal forms. As for their existence in history, Scully has collected hundreds of alimentary proverbs from the French and English medieval traditions, organized according to a typology based on a wide variety of subjects: local cuisines, recipes, preparation of dishes; consumption of food; order and serving of meals; and so on. Metaphoric use is often made of alimentary themes: foodstuffs, cuisine, and eating are treated not only in their material dimension but also as terms of comparison in contemplating the human condition, in every figure of speech—similarities, differences, puns, ambiguities, linguistic “winks.”
Nor is there any paucity of “sociological” proverbs, whose purpose is to define the status and duty of each individual, more often than not to underscore the importance of staying within one’s proper place and not transgressing the limitations of one’s position—proverbs that question the identity of individuals within the social order.
It is precisely within this typology that the cheese-and-pears proverb would seem to fit. But our text is decidedly anomalous within the tradition of proverbs because its prescription derives not from the desire to communicate some kind of knowledge about reality but, on the contrary, from a wish to conceal it. The declared objective is non far sapere, not to inform but to deny access to knowledge—and to deny it, paradoxically, to the peasant himself, in a saying that should have (and effectively does have) wide currency among the peasantry. It is all the more bizarre, then, that an admonition of “popular wisdom” that refers to the peasant (and in which the peasant is in fact the only social subject explicitly mentioned) should occur in the absence of the principal actor. If we were to try to dramatize this text for the theater or the screen, we would have to show a character who is speaking to another while advising, or ordering, him to keep the peasant (missing from the scene) out of their conversation.
Something is not right here. The curiosity of the historian is aroused; he wonders what the origin of such a saying can be, what it means, what ends it can serve.
Erasmus of Rotterdam, when he set about collecting thousands of aphorisms (Adagia) from the writings of ancient authors, regarded them as expressions of crystalline sagacity and absolute clarity, “clear as a gemstone.” Our proverb is anything but clear, however. Erasmus himself advises us to use these brief texts, these aphorisms, these proverbs, as so many “windows on the world,” useful not only to communicate moral or practical precepts in a witty and concise manner, but also to open a chink onto the historical context in which the proverb was produced—because every proverb, every text, is rooted in a specific culture, expresses it and reveals it.
My intention in these pages is to take the cheese-and-pears proverb very seriously, to treat it as a legitimate subject, and to think of it as a window on the world or as a historical document. Its very enigmatic quality may help us understand it.
