In Part One of What Would The World Be Missing If Italy Did Not Exist, we talked about some important contributions that Italy has given the world, for example, Italian food, the most popular being pizza and pasta. Again I ask what would the world be missing if Italy did not exist?
Can you imagine a world without Italian art or literature? Can you imagine the Renaissance being cradled anywhere else in the world? No Italy, no Florence or Tuscany, no Michelangelo, DaVinci, Botticelli, Donatello, Brunelleschi, no Medici, no 17 foot David, no doors of paradise, no dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, no Santa Maria del Fiore, no Giotto’s tower, no Uffizi gallery, no Renaissance, no Ballet which was born during the Renaissance in Italy, no Mona Lisa, no Raffaello, no Macchiavelli and his Prince, no Rome, no birthplace of the Baroque, no Bernini, no Caravaggio, no Borromini, no Pieta’, no Vatican City, no St. Peter’s square, no Italy, no Dante Alighieri and his Divine Comedy, no Giovanni Boccaccio, no Petrarca, no Humanism, no Italy, no Rome, no Roman Empire! Without the Roman Empire we would not have the calendar, as we know it. No months of August (named after Augustus), no July (named after Julius Caesar), no aqueducts or viaducts, no Roman archways, no sewage systems, no efficient highway system, no Roman Law/Politics, no Public Welfare, no newspapers, no Roman Alphabet which is used in the Western world, no Latin, no Italian language. Oh wait a second, what?…no Italian!?
A world with no Italian language! So many words would be eliminated from our language. No torso, no ditto, no graffiti, no fiasco, no casino, no al dente, no fresco, no cappuccino, no gusto, no tutti frutti, no stilettos, no Zamboni or Jacuzzi, no bank, coming from the word banco (table/desk) which the Medici family set up using an I.O. U. system which evolved into our credit cards. No ghetto, no nepotism coming from the Italian word nipote (nephew), no ciao, no Montessori, no Lady Gaga and her Paparazzi, no opera, no Monteverdi, Verdi, Puccini, Rossini or Vivaldi and that’s just a few examples.
Can you imagine what would happen in the language of music? No a cappella, no adagio, no allegro, no forte, no soprano, no alto, no aria, no prima donna, no bel canto, maestro, or tempo. And can you imagine the instruments we would be missing? No piano, no violin, no cello, no viola and some horn instruments as well, yet let’s not overlook the other Italian inventions--the battery, the telephone, yes, the telephone, the radio, the barometer, the thermostat and telescope used to see the skies attributed to Galileo, the prototypes for the parachute, helicopter, and plane given to us by Leonardo DaVinci, no typewriter, no eye glasses, first working combustion engine, dentures, jeans, yes, jeans are made from the cotton of Genoa, Fermi’s nuclear energy and on and on I can go. Oh wait, how about some honorable mentions not necessarily inventors per se but creators, Italian women not already mentioned in the fields of art, science, literature and entertainment. No Italy, no Anna Magnani, no Grazia Deledda Nobel Prize winner for Literature, no Artemisia Gentileschi, no Sophia Loren or Gina Lollobrigida, no Maria Gaetana Agnesi, the first important woman in Mathematics and no Rita Levi Montalcini who with Stanley Cohen received the Nobel Prize in Medicine and whose work plays a significant role in understanding cancers, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and again, on and on I can go.
Now, if Italy did not exist there would be no Italians and therefore no Italian Americans, no Italian ancestry at all, so what would the world be missing?
We’ll talk about that in Part Three, and final post. See you soon--a presto!
We’ll talk about that in Part Three, and final post. See you soon--a presto!
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