Dickens in Carrara: with Marzia Dati

Dominic is joined by  Marzia Dati: Professor of English Literature at  Liceo Marconi High School and founder of the first Italian Branch of the International Dickens Fellowship, in her home town of Carrara. 

Marzia’s new book A Sentimental Journey through Carrara is a visitor’s guide to this remarkable town that sits at the foot of the Apuan Alps, as they slope their way down to the Sea …  

These marble mountains gave Michelangelo the stone from which he cut the figure of his famous David, and today, if you stand in the lobby of the One World Trade Centre in New York, you will see that its walls are also decorated with Carrara’s unique marble …

Dickens visited Carrara in January 1845 and Marzia shares what he, and other famous writers and artists, found there. Grazie per l'attenzione!

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Charles Dickens' A Brain on Fire, a series that digs deep into the life and works of one of the greatest novelists of all time. Ciao everyone! Today's guest is the brilliant Marzia Dati, who is a professor of English literature at Liccio Marconi High School in Carrara. As a multilinguist, Marzia's career has taken her as far afield as Moscow and Los Angeles. She also has the distinction of being the founder of the first Italian branch of the International Dickens Fellowship in her hometown of Carrara. Marzia's new book, A Sentimental Journey Through Carrara, is a visitor's guide to this remarkable town that sits at the foot of the Appian Alps as they slope their way down to the sea. These marble mountains, which envelopara, gave Michelangelo the stone from which he cut the figure of his famous David. And today, if you stand in the lobby of the One World Trade Center in New York, you will see that its walls are also decorated with Carrara's unique marble. It's 1844. Dickens has embarked on a grand tour of Italy and is enjoying what he describes as that incoherent but delightful jumble in my brain, which travelers are apt to have. Keeping a journal that he would later publish as Pictures from Italy, Dickens describes his Italian notes as a series of faint reflections, mere shadows in water. The inference being that on this trip he is a mere observer. Far from it. When he reaches Carrara, he is deeply impressed with the skill of how the marble is sculpted, but he is also dismayed at how it is carried down from the mountains in carts drawn by oxen. Here he writes, Imagine the clumsy carts of 500 years ago being used to this hour and drawn as they used to be 500 years ago by oxen whose ancestors were worn to death five hundred years ago, as their unhappy descendants are now in twelve months by the suffering and agony of this cruel work. In their struggling from stone to stone, with their enormous loads behind them, they die frequently upon the spot, and their passionate drivers, sometimes tumbling down in their energy, are crushed to death beneath the wheels. But it was good five hundred years ago and it must be good now, and a railroad down one of these steeps, the easiest thing in the world, would be flat blasphemy. Dickens is then struck by the contrast of seeing the stunning marble sculptures that have a serenity that hides their painful origin. Standing in one of the many studio of Carrara that afternoon, for it is a great workshop full of beautifully finished copies in marble of almost every figure, group, and bust, it seemed, at first, so strange to me that those exquisite shapes, replete with grace and thought and delicate repose, should grow out of all this toil and sweat and torture. But I soon found a parallel to it, and an explanation of it in every virtue that springs up in miserable ground, and in every good thing that has its birth in sorrow and distress. Right, well, I think it is now time for us to join Marzia in Carrara. Buongiorno. Buongiorno! How are you?

SPEAKER_01 3:36

I'm fine, thank you. I'm so excited, you know, uh at the idea of uh meeting you for the first time on the video. Um just to, you know, to share with you our experience with Dickens in my hometown.

SPEAKER_00 3:54

I'm so excited. And I think I said when I first contacted you that after the UK and and America, Italy is the next country that listens to this podcast. I'm honored. There you go. Well, I I am so glad you are speaking English and not Italian to me right now. So I'm I'm very lucky. So no, it's it's I will try to do my best. Do you probably understand English grammar better than I do?

SPEAKER_01 4:16

I teach I teach English in the high school.

SPEAKER_00 4:19

So you definitely do then.

SPEAKER_01 4:21

Yeah, English and English literature. So I'm supposed to know the grammar, but you know, uh your language is really, really difficult. Is it is it difficult? It is, it's very difficult because it's completely different from Italian because it's a German language, yeah, our language is Latin, and for us, for the Italians, it's really difficult the pronunciation because uh, I mean, uh uh um you write in a way and you read the words in another, and so for us it's something uh very difficult, believe me.

SPEAKER_00 4:56

Well, I I really appreciate the efforts of every uh English-speaking Italian. So welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. I suppose my first question really is what were the steps that led you towards Charles Dickens yourself?

SPEAKER_01 5:13

So um I've always loved Charles Dickens since uh I was a little girl, and uh, when I studied English literature at Pisa University, Dickens was my favorite writer. So I decided to become a member of the Dickens Fellowship. And uh little by little, step by step, I found out that just Dickens uh was in Carrara in my town, and he uh describes uh the Marble Quarry, famous all over the world, and uh My Town, uh the quarry man working in the quarry in pictures from Italy, and then in some letters he sent to his close friend his biographer. But my love for Dickens is very old since my childhood.

SPEAKER_00 6:08

So is Dickens commonly known, commonly read in Italy today?

SPEAKER_01 6:12

Do you think right? Yes, it is, yes, it's very popular, very famous. In particular, David Copperfield, uh, hard times, uh, great expectations. So, and it is taught at school uh in uh in high school, and then uh Christmas Carol is very famous, very popular in uh in my country. Of course, uh, reading Dickens in English uh for us is really, really difficult. And so some of my colleagues adopt an Italian translation, but it's I think it's very important just because to understand what the Victorian age was, the setting, and and let me say that Dickens is uh often compared to compared to a very famous Italian novelist, his contemporary, Alessandro Manzoni, who wrote the famous novel, The Beathroated.

SPEAKER_00 7:11

Yes. So have you attempted to translate Dickens into Italian yourself? Have you had any other Italian translations that you like that give you something else?

SPEAKER_01 7:20

Yeah, so the Italian translation of Dickens are fantastic. Yeah, also because I know the Italian translator, they are very good, excellent academics. So um they translated most of his novels. I translated into Italian two of his short stories titled Traveling Abroad. They are very famous, just because I'm very interested in what we call the grand tour, and I'm interested in the fact that uh Dickens visited Carrara, and Carrara was not a destination of the so-called grand tour. So it is uh traveling abroad, is uh uh one of my translations uh published uh some years ago. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:12

Oh that's excellent. And and Carrara is a is does make a big impression on Dickens, doesn't it? When he goes that describes it as uh picturesque and bold. Yeah. I love that. And I think um so it has all the prettiness that he's enjoying going through places in Italy and the scenery and the site, but there's something about the marble that's so powerful. Can you tell us more about the history and the marble of your town?

SPEAKER_01 8:35

Yes, uh as you know, uh Carrara is uh is famous all over the world for the uh the marble, uh white marble used by the most famous artists, sculptors. Uh Michelangelo uh lived here just around the corner in the very center when he came to Carrara to choose the best quality for his uh his masterpiece. But uh when Dickens arrived in Carrara, he was not interested in the town, which is quite pretty. It's very old, there are medieval buildings, there is a long history here in Carrara. He was shocked, I would say shocked, not impressed, so in a negative way, by our quarries, because it criticized the old system of transportation of these big, big, big blocks. Because I understand Dickens in some way, because he was coming from the industrialized England, from the uh Victorian England. So it was 1845, in 1851, the Great Exhibition showed, I mean, how England was the most powerful economic country in the world. So it was shocked by the fact that in our quarries, the Roman method was still used. And so he can't you know accept um I mean uh this fact, and he criticized the fact that animals were exploited, in particular oxen. If you read pictures uh from Italy, he describes the way oxen were treated by men. And so behind this, there's a deeper criticism against the Duke of Modena, because at that time my territory was uh ruled by the Duke of Modena. Modena, as you know, is um a beautiful town near Boulogne, and he ruled this territory just to have a way out to the sea, okay, because Modena is far from the sea, but he abandoned completely this town. And Dickens was able to understand what the situation was here. It is amazing, I think.

SPEAKER_00 11:07

I mean, looking at pictures in Italy overall, it's very interesting because Dickens is a contradiction, I think, himself. So he's in love with Italy and then he gets cross with certain things, and then he forgets that he was cross and talks about how he's going to miss it all the time when he goes back to England. I think that's that's a kind of travel experience, I think, that a lot of people can relate to because I think we all know what it feels like to go on holiday and look back and think, oh, that was amazing. But at the time there are things that are difficult.

SPEAKER_01 11:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:34

When he first arrives in Genoa, he says, I was set down in a rank, dull, weedy courtyard, attached to a kind of pink jail, and was told I lived there.

SPEAKER_01 11:45

In al bar or nice place.

SPEAKER_00 11:47

Yeah, but but but also and inside he says about all the chairs are immovable and the sofa weighs a ton. And you know, that because he was such a control freak, that what he did when he got there was try and change all the furniture around and couldn't. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:02

Yes, yes. And you can feel his um uh criticism against my country, and I think that's the main responsible for this kind of uh backwardness was a Catholic Church, Roman Catholic Church. Yeah, and uh yeah, and so he arrived in Italy in 1845 when Italy was divided, still divided up in many different states. So um he stopped in Carrara on his journey to Rome, and so he had to pass through different states with different uh money and different rules, different rulers. So to him was something you know strange, I think, like for every Englishman visiting uh my country in uh those times, you know.

SPEAKER_00 12:52

So yes, it is strange. Is it strange to you being Italian? Because certainly from a British perspective, I I think of Italy, you think of ancient Rome, yeah, and then you think of the Renaissance, and when you think of the Renaissance, you don't think of Italy being separate states, principalities, and dukedoms at all. I mean, I know they were, but it doesn't occur to me anyway to think of it that way.

SPEAKER_01 13:13

But yeah, yeah, yeah. See, I I know because from your perspective, uh Italy is perceived in a different way, but until 1861, it was divided up in many, many different states. And for example, we, I mean, we when I say we, I'm sorry, I say Carrara, uh, was never a part of the Grand Dukey of Tuscany, for example. Okay, so nothing to do with the Florence. Can you believe that? And uh, for example, um, the Milan region and uh Veneto, which is a region uh where Venice, of course, and Verona were under the rule of the Austrians, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:55

So yeah, he talks about Swiss soldiers being in a lot of are they mercenaries?

SPEAKER_01 14:01

Are they hired by dukes and yeah, yeah, yeah, it was a nightmare. But after 1861, so at last Italy was a united country, but with a lot of problems, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:15

You know, though, from reading what Dickens says about Britain, that he doesn't just criticize Italy, does he? He definitely criticizes the ways of England and London and all of that. Wherever he goes, but what I love about that is at the start of the book, he says that he's not going to really go into all of that, he's not going to talk about the politics, then he starts to a little bit. What I do find interesting, and I think this is why travel is obviously so important. He has ideas about Catholicism and preconception from a very anglicized viewpoint. Yeah, but then he is impressed by Catholics that he meets as well. I mean, in some he doesn't think very much of, but then suddenly he comes across this friar, doesn't he?

SPEAKER_01 14:51

I think yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But he he was also impressed by what he saw in Rome at that time. Um, the Vatican uh kingdom, as we say in Italian, is a stato pontificio, was huge. It was huge because it reached the Adriatic Sea. So from the Tyrrhen Sea to the Adriatic Sea. And so he was really impressed. So and he describes in every detail what he saw in Rome. Yeah, but yeah, the friars he met in Genoa, for example, I think it's a very funny description of these members of the clergy and of the Italian church. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

Is there anything in particular that what attracts you, but also other Italian people, perhaps to Dickens as an English writer? Is there something common between Italian character or or English character, you think?

SPEAKER_01 15:51

So what uh attracts uh the Italians is a narrative, is characters, of course, uh, because um, just to mention uh Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, you know, um very popular in in this country, but uh what attracts most is narrative. He uses a lot of digression uh when he writes, and this kind of narrative is very close to Italian narrative, right? Yeah, I didn't know incredible when we read Dickens at our branch, uh, because every year we we choose, of course, a novel by Dickens, and we read in Italian for those who can't speak English, and then in English. And so what they appreciate, as far as I can see, is the way he writes and how he depicts the Victorian society and the way he creates this um his characters. In particular, we play a lot on uh his uh talking names because, like uh Grand Grind, and we work a lot on this, and our members and the people uh who attend our meetings enjoy it so much. So, not only the plot, the setting, and the characters, but they are attracted by his narrative.

SPEAKER_00 17:20

Yeah, the way he writes is fantastic, superb. He's the most famous Victorian possibly in the world, but yet he's somehow more fun, I think, than a lot of um Victorian writers, perhaps.

SPEAKER_01 17:33

Yes, of course, but at the same time, there's uh always a message, there's always a kind of criticism, and so uh that's uh what I like most personally. Yeah, yes, and there are some themes uh which are very contemporary, for example, uh this year we are reading A Tale of Two Cities, which is uh not very popular and very famous in Italy. The average Italian reader doesn't know it. So for us, uh, it was very important to propose the reading of this. And we stopped uh in particular on the first chapter, because if we didn't know that it was written in the Victorian age, I think what he describes would be applicable to the contemporary world. It's incredible, in particular, the first and the second paragraph of chapter one from A Tale of Two City. So what we try to make what he wrote contemporary, to find something which can be linked to contemporary world.

SPEAKER_00 18:46

Yes, yeah, he even says in the first paragraph, doesn't he, the time was so far like the present. Yes, that's obviously Dickens' present, but it's also our present as well.

SPEAKER_01 18:54

That this is what I mean, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:56

And that's that's the mark of a great writer, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 18:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:59

Well, I love a tale of two cities, I think that's a that's a great one.

SPEAKER_01 19:03

I must say that uh I can't say it's my favorite, but uh I am uh appreciating it more than I used to do in the past. Yes, it's fantastic. Um do you have a favorite? Do you know? My favorite one is hard times.

SPEAKER_00 19:19

Really?

SPEAKER_01 19:19

Oh wow, for example. Um uh my student, I um I teach in high school, and uh, English literature is one of their major. And this year I proposed uh the reading of hard times, and we talked a lot about the idea of education uh described in our times and our idea of education, and it was fantastic. My 18-year-old student appreciated now, they love it. Can you believe that education, particularly in this country? I know that in England, in the US is different from uh from Italy. Um, now is just uh I'm not saying it's just becoming fact-only fact, but we had to be very careful. And so uh we developed um researches uh and uh discussions about this uh theme, thanks to hard times.

SPEAKER_00 20:28

That's wonderful to hear. Yes, it's tricky, isn't it? Because obviously we need facts in the world at the moment in the kind of fake news environment, but at the same time, if all you think about are figures on a balance sheet, empirical facts all the time, then that's a problem as well.

SPEAKER_01 20:43

And the hard times uh is not only Coke Town and the problem, the side effect of industrialization. We know that, of course, we know that, but there's something more. We had uh what you call industrial revolution um in a later time, but we are living now in what we call technological revolution, so we have to weigh up the pros and cons of this, and so that's why I decided to read hard times with my students, just to compare that industrial revolution and the present industrial revolution, because more or less they are you know influencing, affecting our lives, our behavior. We try to find some parallelism between the industrial revolution in Victorian age, the one described by Dickens in our times, and the present situation.

SPEAKER_00 21:43

So when when you said you loved Dickens since you were a young girl, what were the stories then that you read?

SPEAKER_01 21:50

Um A Christmas Carol was my favorite of course. It appealed in my imagination when I was eight or nine years old. And then my favorite was David Copperfield. Oh, I was in love with David in my teens, and I uh read it so many times. And uh yeah, it was David Copperfield.

SPEAKER_00 22:16

David's a great character, isn't he? Because um, as a hero in a novel, he's full of vulnerability and insecurity. And I love that moment where he gets drunk for the first time.

SPEAKER_01 22:27

Yeah, yeah, and the setting, and it had a great impact on uh on me, and also because uh it's a kind of a Bildungsroman. I mean, the the the story of uh this child is a child and is you know, um still, I mean, uh, his mature life, and so this is what we call Bildungsroman in uh literature, and so um the setting, uh the other characters.

SPEAKER_00 22:58

You studied Dickens then at university as well, is that right?

SPEAKER_01 23:02

Yes, yes, yes, I studied the foreign languages uh at Pisa University, and my first language, foreign language, uh, was English. So English literature from old English literature to contemporary. And my second language was Russian language and literature, so I studied both uh the language, yeah, languages. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:26

That's that's incredibly impressive. So you speak Russian then as well?

SPEAKER_01 23:29

Oh, yes, very fluently. Um, just uh because I lived in uh in uh in uh Moscow in Petersburg for a long time, I studied there, and so yeah, yes, I'm quite fluent.

SPEAKER_00 23:40

Do you still have friends out in St. Petersburg at the moment?

SPEAKER_01 23:43

Yes, uh, I I have uh many, many friends in Moscow because it's my favorite uh city, and in Petersburg and in other uh cities, yeah, in Russia, yeah, and I've got friends in Ukraine.

SPEAKER_00 23:59

Are you talking to them at the moment? It must be a very, very difficult now.

SPEAKER_01 24:03

It's very difficult because uh I can't contact them, and if we can, we only talk about culture and uh exhibitions, uh, we don't mention anything else, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, hard times, hard times for these times, as uh Dickens say says. Absolutely very hard times, yeah. But I'm very lucky because I had the possibility to know a complete different culture, you know, the Western culture and the eastern culture. It helped me a lot in my life, of course.

SPEAKER_00 24:39

I'm very lucky, yeah, and and it changes your perception, doesn't it, to be in those places, a bit like Dickens in Italy, how it changed what he thought, you know. Yeah, yeah. And what he thought was idleness with people lazing about in the streets in the sun. He started to like it. I now know what this is. This is this is a characteristic of southern people, yeah. Of course, but it's so hot. What are you supposed to do in the summer?

SPEAKER_01 25:03

But um asking in the sun, yeah, of course, of course.

SPEAKER_00 25:08

I've I've spent some nice times in Italy doing that. I've yeah, it's so funny. But I think Italy gets inside his head, doesn't it? Yeah, because he talks about feeling rusty, that if he tries to think, it will make a creaking sound, which I love. It's funny to see him kind of a spectator so much that he's not driving anything that's happening to him, which is what you normally expect when he writes about things.

SPEAKER_01 25:30

Yeah, I agree with you, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:31

You see another side of him, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:33

Yes, you see another side of him, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 25:36

So you study Dickens at Pisa, and I love that it's Pisa as well, because obviously Dickens goes to Pisa in Italian notes, doesn't he?

SPEAKER_01 25:42

Yes, he went to Pisa, yeah. So of course then um we stopped in uh Leghorn, where Tobias Smallate is buried, and yeah, in Pisa and Leghorn, there was uh a very big community of um English and uh Americans, as we say, and everything on its way to Rome.

SPEAKER_00 26:08

Yes. Is there something about the effect do you think of Carrara on on visitors? Because in in your book, in your book, your your sentimental journey through Carrara has lots of poetry in it from writers who have lived and visited. But there's that Emily Dickinson poem, I've dropped my brain.

unknown 26:27

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 26:28

Can you believe that Emily Dickinson never traveled because uh she was born and lived all her life in Massachusetts in her native town? But she quotes Carrara the difference between uh, for example, Ruskin or Ezra Pound and Ferlinghetti, Lawrence Ferlinghetti or Aldus Huxley, because they were here. Okay, probably she knew Carrara because of its marble, and all the most famous uh Renaissance artists uh were here. I repeat, Michelangelo, Canova, Antonio Canova, and probably Carrara in this uh poem is related to the idea of marble. Marble is cold, cold like death. And since death is one of her um most important characters in all her poems, so she associated the idea of Carrara with coldness with death. Okay, but it's amazing that she quoted our town from so far away in Massachusetts. Yeah, so far away without. I mean, she she had never been here.

SPEAKER_00 27:46

So yes, I get a feeling that in popular imagination, yeah, Carada holds you somehow and takes over. Yeah, it takes over your head, or you're taken out of the driver's seat, perhaps of your life a little bit, if you're a visitor or you're imagining it.

SPEAKER_01 28:02

Yeah, just to give you an example, I have traveled uh a lot all my life. And when I was asked, where are you from? And I said Carrara, everybody knows where Carrara is because in the uh imagination of um people in the world, Carrara is marble, the the main destination of the most relevant and eminent artists of all times. That's why.

SPEAKER_00 28:32

Carrara is the obvious place then to establish the Italian branch of the Dickens Fellowship.

SPEAKER_01 28:38

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:39

So what uh how did you do this?

SPEAKER_01 28:41

So, you know, uh Carrara is not Florence, is not Milan, is not Rome, Genoa, but uh um Carrara was an international town in in the past due to the um marble uh trade. There was uh a British consulate here and a US consulate, okay. So I think that the the Dickens fellowship here makes sense because uh through our activities, first of all, um we try to connect world writer like a global writer, let me say this, like Dickens, in our territory. So we are trying to do what uh Baumann, the famous sociologist, say about globalization to make global what is local. And so Carrara, its history, its ties with the English-speaking world and Dickens between our town and the world. This is our idea of the branch, but we are not English because most of the branches in the world are in the in the UK and US. We are the first in Italy. When I started attending the council meeting in London, the international conferences organized by Central Dickens Fellowship. I was in Aberdeen, I was in Bristol, I was um in Chicago with the Dickens Fellowship. They proposed us to open up a branch in Italy because in Italy there was no branch. And so I gathered some friends who love Dickens, uh, some colleagues, and so our journey started in 2013, but uh we were recognized as an official branch of the Central Dickens Fellowship in 2016.

unknown 30:49

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 30:50

We are working on uh an exhibition about a very famous native playwright and translator. He was born in 1873 and he died in 1968, and he adapted one of the Dickens' Christmas carols for the theater, for the Italian theater, The Cricket on the Earth. And he has a great success and is considered the best translator of Shakespeare's complete works. Can you believe it was uh he was born here? And now we are trying to organize an exhibition with his manuscript about uh his relation to the English literature. It will be a permanent exhibition in the premises of the Dickens Fellowship because he is uh well known, his name was Cesare Vico Lodovici, uh is very famous in Italy as a playwright, but not a translator from English into Italian, even translated T. S. Eliot and Eugene O'Neill, and many, many others. So the Dickens Fellowship will host this permanent exhibition dedicated to him. We are working very hard because all his archive is kept in Genoa, and so we have to commute with my collaborators to Genova to study, to take pictures of the manuscripts. But what we found there um is uh is a theory on translations, and so which uh translation is not um easy, in particular from English into Italian.

SPEAKER_00 32:44

Yes, because because you obviously you mentioned the stories that you translated of Dickens. How do you how what were the rules of that for yourself? How did you do that?

SPEAKER_01 32:52

When I translate, uh and in the case of Dickens, I can't translate uh word by word because uh I have to respect uh the Italian language, but uh what I always try to do is to be faithful.

SPEAKER_00 33:08

Yes. Well, I've learned that only from doing adaptations of Dickens that if you're too careful and you hold on too tight to the work, it never quite works as strongly, does it? That you can't be frightened of the material that you're handling. How does the Italian sentence structure differ then from English?

SPEAKER_01 33:27

Okay, Dickens' um uh narrative, as I said at the beginning of our talk, is very uh similar to Italian. So there's a main clause and then many, many other clause, reputation, figure of speech, uh a lot of them. And so for us, um, it's not difficult to translate him, it's difficult to translate other writers because you use a shorter paragraph, shorter uh sentence, and for us, we are not very pragmatic, okay, and uh and very uh simple, we are very wordy, I mean Italian speakers, and so sometimes it's very difficult to translate short sentences or too close, it's very short together. Whereas Dickens for us is much better because his way of writing is like ours, the the the fullness and the musicality of it.

SPEAKER_00 34:22

Yeah, I can imagine that.

SPEAKER_01 34:24

Yeah, yes, his reputation, how he plays with words. This is fantastic, and so I try to respect this. I don't want to be a traitor of uh his uh ideas and of his wonderful English language, but it's very difficult.

SPEAKER_00 34:43

Do you plan to do any more translations? Are there other Dickens stories or yes, yes.

SPEAKER_01 34:49

Uh yes, I've planned, I've planned some of them, but it would be a surprise. It would be a surprise, okay, okay. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:56

Okay, because I wondered about the chimes because of Genoa and the bells, and yeah, it's fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 35:01

I love it.

SPEAKER_00 35:01

But it's interesting, it's interesting you say about Italian being a very full, uh, not very economical uh language, because I always imagined that Latin itself is quite well, I think Latin is famous for being very succinct. And yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:15

So it's interesting in the story of Italian speech, how it bloomed, how it enlarged over yes, it enlarged, it enlarged from um Dante onwards, Petrarca Dante are great uh writers, yeah. And Latin is, as we say, a very logic language, and it is still um studied at school, for example, in the high school where I teach, which is a scientific school. Can you believe that? They study Latin from the first grade to the fifth grade because it helps logic, like philosophy. And so it's a wonderful language. And I'm very happy that uh in some most school is still compulsory in this country.

SPEAKER_00 36:05

Yeah, well, you'll be pleased. I I studied Latin when I was very, very small. Ah, really? When I was very little at school, yeah. Um, we had that compulsory for uh for a couple of years. I don't remember it because it was a long time ago, but it's um it's interesting though, isn't it? As how how useful it is still, though. And um, because you think of Shakespeare going to school in Stratford, he would have studied Latin so much, in fact, possibly more than Latin scholars today. Just as a child, he would have soaked up all of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then that gives perhaps the focus to longer, richer, imaginative prose.

SPEAKER_01 36:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:39

If you have Latin as a foundation under it, I wonder.

SPEAKER_01 36:42

Yes, exactly, exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:46

Oh gosh. Oh, Matsya, this has been so wonderful talking to you. Thank you so much for your time.

SPEAKER_01 36:52

How put that to everything I said uh is clearer.

SPEAKER_00 36:57

Oh, it's very clear, clear as a bell, no editing required. It's excellent. Thank you. It's always the way that very often people speak English better when it's not their first language. Whereas the English people were uh we we don't study grammar in England, we don't study our own grammar, so we're all over the place, yeah, which can be inventive and fun and exciting, but other times you just you get lost. It's only when you learn another language you understand what a noun is.

SPEAKER_01 37:22

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:22

You know, or a verb or an adverb or a or clauses, tenses.

SPEAKER_01 37:26

In old times when I attended high school, I studied Latin. I also took an exam of Latin literature at university. Um Latin was more popular than uh uh it is today, and uh English, foreign languages um in general were taught like Latin. So we learned a lot of your grammar rules, and we used to translate from English into Italian, from Italian into English. Now things uh have changed, of course, because English is uh a communicative language in particular for us, because Italian is not spoken all over the world, and so we need you know to develop communicative skills, but in old times it was considered like Latin. That's why we studied a lot of grammar.

SPEAKER_00 38:18

Yes, it's good to know that that happens, that that goes on. Let's hope the UK brings it back, could bring back its own grammar. But um, no, thank you, thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 38:28

Thank you, and come to Carrara to visit.

SPEAKER_00 38:30

Oh, yes, please. Yes, I'd love to. I'd love to.

SPEAKER_01 38:33

I will show you all the places.

SPEAKER_00 38:35

I will, and I'll bring my own copy. I've got it here. There you are. Fantastic. Bye-bye. Lots of love. Bye now.

SPEAKER_01 38:40

Lots of love.

SPEAKER_00 38:46

I want to keep adverts off this podcast. So if you're enjoying these episodes and would like to make a small donation, please follow the link in the description wherever you're listening to this, and you can buy us a coffee. All contributions make a huge difference. This week I'd like to thank someone who wishes to remain anonymous, but I know who you are, and I'm so grateful to you. Thank you. See you all next time.