Wednesday, July 26, 2023
Learning to Read Italian
Peter Brown, Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023), pp. 166-167:
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Somehow I came to read Italian. I taught myself through reading articles in Italian journals and Italian books on tenth-century Rome, on the Norman kingdom of Sicily, and on the fascinating figure of the emperor Frederick the Second (1194-1250). I approached these books on the happy-go-lucky principle that Italian was, somehow, a mixture of the best in French and the worst in Latin. To read the orotund prose of Italian historians was like coming upon the firm lines of a Roman inscription in a late, late Latin that had gone to seed, warmed in Mediterranean sunlight.When I was in graduate school, I took a course in Latin palaeography, and one of the assigned textbooks was in Italian. A fellow student, bolder or more foolhardy than I, objected that he didn't read Italian. The professor responded that he had better learn the language quickly then.
