It didn't start out well:
Roger e un ragazzo americano. Maria e una ragazza italiana. Roger e Maria sono amici. . .
Roger is an American boy visiting Italy. He goes to a cafĂ© and tries to pick up a local girl. In the first lesson we learned “What is your name?”, "Your country is beautiful," and "How old are you."
Roger learns the time so he won’t be late for the cinema, learns the names of food so he can order in the restaurant, gets an overview of national history as they tour the museums. In Chapter 10, we learn the Italian word for "kiss" (bacio).
Why do even language-learning dialogues have to be about a boy and a girl? No men in Italy?
I knew about Thomas Mann's gay obsession in Death in Venice, and about Wilhelm Van Gloeden's homoerotic photographs of Sicilian youth, but they were German.
And I discovered a whole gay world in Renaissance Italy, artists, writers, statesmen.
1. Leonardo Da Vinci. He got a girlfriend on Rocky and Bullwinkle.
2. Michelangelo. As portrayed by Charleton Heston in The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), he got a girlfriend.
3. Donatello, who sculpted the famously effeminate David, a counterpart to Michelangelo's more macho version.
4. Benvenuto Cellini. His Autobiography was on the list of recommended readings in my class in Renaissance History in college. But not a word in class.
5. Caravaggio, played by Dexter Fletcher and Nigel Terry in the 1986 movie.
6. Aretino, who wrote Il Marescalco, about a gay man forced to marry a woman, but she turns out to be a man.
7. Ariosto. I bought his Orlando Furioso in a Ballantine Adult Fantasy edition, but had no idea.
8. Matteo Bandello, who wrote 12 Novelle, one about a gay man.
9. Dante. Ok, he was probably heterosexual, and from the Middle Ages, but he wrote the beefcake and bonding classic, The Inferno.
10. The painter Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, nicknamed "Il Sodoma"
11. Giovanni, the foreign exchange student I had a crush on at Rocky High.
Some readings of Inferno assume Dante's teacher molested him. Obviously that doesn't make Dante gay, but it makes the seventh circle (otherwise a homophobic game of One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others) more understandable.
ReplyDeleteA lot of scholars try to redeem Dante by pointing out that he honors his old teacher.
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