La Bella Lingua
My Love Affair with Italian, the World's Most Enchanting Language
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Narrated by:
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Suzanne Toren
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By:
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Dianne Hales
About this listen
"Italians say that someone who acquires a new language 'possesses' it. In my case, Italian possesses me. With Italian racing like blood through my veins, I do indeed see with different eyes, hear with different ears, and drink in the world with all my senses...."
A celebration of the language and culture of Italy, La Bella Lingua is the story of how a language shaped a nation, told against the backdrop of one woman's personal quest to speak fluent Italian.
For anyone who has been to Italy, the fantasy of living the Italian life is powerfully seductive. But to truly become Italian, one must learn the language. This is how Dianne Hales began her journey. In La Bella Lingua, she brings the story of her decades-long experience with "the world's most loved and lovable language" together with explorations of Italy's history, literature, art, music, movies, lifestyle, and food in a true opera amorosa - a labor of her love of Italy.
Throughout her first excursion in Italy - with "non parlo Italiano" as her only Italian phrase - Dianne delighted in the beauty of what she saw but craved comprehension of what she heard. And so she chose to inhabit the language. Over more than 25 years she has studied Italian in every way possible: through Berlitz, books, CDs, podcasts, private tutorials and conversation groups, and, most importantly, large blocks of time in Italy. In the process she found that Italian became not just a passion and a pleasure but a passport into Italy's storia and its very soul.
She offers charming insights into what makes Italian the most emotionally expressive of languages, from how the "pronto" ("ready!") Italians say when they answer the telephone conveys a sense of something coming alive to how even ordinary things such as a towel (asciugamano) or handkerchief (fazzoletto) sound better in Italian. She invites readers to join her as she traces the evolution of Italian in the zesty graffiti on the walls of Pompeii, in Dante's incandescent cantos, and in Boccaccio's bawdy Decameron. She portrays how social graces remain woven into the fabric of Italian: Even the chipper "ciao", which does double duty as "hi" and "bye", reflects centuries of bella figura. And she exalts the glories of Italy's food and its rich and often uproarious gastronomic language: Italians deftly describe someone uptight as a baccala (dried cod), a busybody who noses into everything as a prezzemolo (parsley), a worthless or banal movie as a polpettone (large meatball).
Like Dianne, listeners of La Bella Lingua will find themselves innamorata, enchanted, by Italian, fascinated by its saga, tantalized by its adventures, addicted to its sound, and ever eager to spend more time in its company.
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In The Possessed we watch Elif Batuman investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin's wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has 100 different words for crying; and see an 18th-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their places in The Possessed.
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Dear Russian Literary Diary...
- By Darwin8u on 08-29-17
By: Elif Batuman
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Keats
- A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph
- By: Lucasta Miller
- Narrated by: Sally Scott
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Miller, through Keats’s poetry, brilliantly resurrects and brings vividly to life, the man, the poet in all his complexity and spirit, living dangerously, disdaining respectability and cultural norms, and embracing subversive politics. Keats was a lower-middle-class outsider from a tragic and fractured family, whose extraordinary energy and love of language allowed him to pummel his way into the heart of English literature; a freethinker and a liberal at a time of repression, who delighted in the sensation of the moment.
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A Romantic Life
- By David on 05-03-22
By: Lucasta Miller
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The Club
- Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age
- By: Leo Damrosch
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 15 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk's Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually, the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as "the Club". In this captivating audiobook, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters.
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Wonderful survey
- By Tad Davis on 05-10-19
By: Leo Damrosch
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Leonardo and the Last Supper
- By: Ross King
- Narrated by: Mark Meadows
- Length: 11 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Early in 1495, Leonardo da Vinci began work in Milan on what would become one of history's most influential and beloved works of art - The Last Supper. After a dozen years at the court of Lodovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, Leonardo was at a low point personally and professionally: at 43, in an era when he had almost reached the average life expectancy, he had failed, despite a number of prestigious commissions, to complete anything that truly fulfilled his astonishing promise.
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Informative yet creative
- By Isabellabasil on 05-27-15
By: Ross King
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I Am Dynamite!
- A Life of Nietzsche
- By: Sue Prideaux
- Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith
- Length: 17 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Nietzsche wrote that all philosophy is autobiographical, and in this vividly compelling, myth-shattering biography, Sue Prideaux brings listeners into the world of this brilliant, eccentric, and deeply troubled man, illuminating the events and people that shaped his life and work. I Am Dynamite! is the essential biography for anyone seeking to understand history's most misunderstood philosopher.
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Fascinating; tragic
- By Cineaste21 on 12-30-18
By: Sue Prideaux
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Fryderyk Chopin
- A Life and Times
- By: Dr. Alan Walker
- Narrated by: Corrie James
- Length: 23 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Based on 10 years of research and a vast cache of primary sources located in archives in Warsaw, Paris, London, New York, and Washington, D.C., Alan Walker's monumental Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times is the most comprehensive biography of the great Polish composer to appear in English in more than a century. Walker's work is a corrective biography, intended to dispel the many myths and legends that continue to surround Chopin.
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This book is a masterpiece
- By Carpe Diem on 02-09-19
By: Dr. Alan Walker
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City Boy
- My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s
- By: Edmund White
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In the New York of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of enormous intrigue and artistic tumult.
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Pretense upon pretense.
- By Shalin Desai on 06-01-15
By: Edmund White
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A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
- 1599
- By: James Shapiro
- Narrated by: James Shapiro
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Abridged
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1599 was an epochal year for Shakespeare and England. During that year, Shakespeare wrote four of his most famous plays: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and, most remarkably, Hamlet; Elizabethans sent off an army to crush an Irish rebellion, weathered an Armada threat from Spain, gambled on a fledgling East India Company, and waited to see who would succeed their aging and childless queen.
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Note!--Abridged version
- By Scott on 01-05-16
By: James Shapiro
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Castles, Customs, and Kings
- True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors
- By: Debra Brown, M.M. Bennetts
- Narrated by: Ruth Golding
- Length: 25 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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A compilation of essays from the English Historical Fiction Authors blog, this book provides a wealth of historical information from Roman Britain to early 20th-century England. Over 50 different authors share hundreds of real life stories and tantalizing tidbits discovered while doing research for their own historical novels.
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Historical Tidbits
- By Troy on 08-03-15
By: Debra Brown, and others
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The Lady in Gold
- The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, 'Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer'
- By: Anne-Marie O'Connor
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 10 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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The Lady in Gold, considered an unforgettable masterpiece, one of the 20th century's most recognizable paintings, made headlines all over the world when Ronald Lauder bought it for $135 million a century after Klimt, the most famous Austrian painter of his time, completed the society portrait. Anne-Marie O'Connor, writer for the Washington Post, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, tells the galvanizing story of the Lady in Gold, Adele Bloch-Bauer, a dazzling Viennese Jewish society figure.
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Get a better narrator.
- By David A Weatherbie on 04-13-15
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Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea
- Why the Greeks Matter
- By: Thomas Cahill
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Best selling history writer Thomas Cahill continues his series on the roots of Western civilization with this volume about the contributions of ancient Greece to the development of contemporary culture. Tracing the origin of Greek culture in the migrations of armed Indo-European horsemen into Attica and the Peloponnesian peninsula, he follows their progress into the creation of the Greek city-states, the refinement of their machinery of war, and the flowering of intellectual and artistic culture.
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Super super
- By Richard on 12-28-03
By: Thomas Cahill
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Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know
- By: Colm Toibin
- Narrated by: Colm Toibin
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Elegant, profound, and riveting, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know illuminates not only the complex relationships between three of the greatest writers in the English language and their fathers, but also illustrates the surprising ways these men surface in their work. Through these stories of fathers and sons, Tóibín recounts the resistance to English cultural domination, the birth of modern Irish cultural identity, and the extraordinary contributions of these complex and masterful authors.
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Eminently re-readable
- By Ellen-A on 01-02-19
By: Colm Toibin
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Rebel Souls
- Walt Whitman and America's First Bohemians
- By: Justin Martin
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Rebel Souls is the first book ever written about the colorful group of artists - regulars at Pfaff's Saloon in Manhattan - rightly considered America's original Bohemians. Besides a young Whitman, the circle included actor Edwin Booth; trailblazing stand–up comic Artemus Ward; psychedelic drug pioneer and author Fitz Hugh Ludlow; and brazen performer Adah Menken, famous for her Naked Lady routine. Central to their times, the artists managed to forge connections with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, and even Abraham Lincoln.
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A Wonderful Read with Vibrant Characters
- By A on 11-11-15
By: Justin Martin
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Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World
- By: Leo Damrosch
- Narrated by: David Stifel
- Length: 20 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Jonathan Swift is best remembered today as the author of Gulliver’s Travels, the satiric fantasy that quickly became a classic and has remained in print for nearly three centuries. Yet Swift also wrote many other influential works, was a major political and religious figure in his time, and became a national hero, beloved for his fierce protest against English exploitation of his native Ireland. What is really known today about the enigmatic man behind these accomplishments? Can the facts of his life be separated from the fictions?
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JOHNATHAN SWIFT AND POWER OF THE PEN
- By chetyarbrough.blog on 09-30-14
By: Leo Damrosch
What listeners say about La Bella Lingua
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Christian White
- 06-09-21
Starts off interesting, tapers. Didn't finish.
I was hoping for more based on the book description and the 5 min audible sample. Midway through the book the author gets off task and dives into Italian history and literature instead of expounding more on her personal journey with Italian - as the book title promises.
Also - just a small note - i imagine the audience who is interested in reading this book already have backgrounds in Italian. At the beginning especially, the author mixes in a lot of Italian with her English sentences, which I loved. what i didn't love was the frequent pauses in trains of thought that the author took to gloss the Italian words. Unless the Italian word was slang or some type of saying, there was no need to define every single Italian word mentioned.
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- Ella
- 01-08-23
A gift to lovers of all things Italian.
I loved every minute of this fantastic book.
I only wish it wouldn’t end. Grateful.
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- Gizelle
- 01-10-19
My new best friend
I ADORED every minute of this book! I feel like I have a new best friend - who is witty, well spoken and well travelled, likes the same things I do, holds secrets well, is polite but can tell a hilariously naughty story as needed. I learned about the origins of the language, some history, literary figures, things I slept through in school... this is a fun, informative, book about Italy, Italians, and ITALIAN. GET IT on Audible, and get to know your new best friend - you will love her!
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2 people found this helpful
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- amavita
- 03-03-22
Good material, pretentious reading
So sad that this book was not narrated by a truly bilingual English/Italian speaker. It is beyond annoying to listen to this overly dramatic and painstaking attempt at pronouncing Italian words by a non-Italian speaker. The content of the book is interesting, with engaging anecdotes about Italy's history and personalities, but it's difficult to get past the narrator's elevated tone, as if she were on the Shakespearean stage rather than reading little bits about Italy and its language.
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- Amazon Customer
- 01-26-23
Absolutely, totally...loved it!
I"ll soon commence a beginner's course in Italian and I can"t imagine a better introduction to the Italian language and culture than this book.
Diane Hales eloquent use of words to describe the subtle nuances of the Italian language, its customs, historical influences and impacts in literature, cinema and everyday human life is witty and entertaining.
It's one of the best audio books in my large Audible collection.
Suzanne Toren! What a beautiful voice she has. She gives life, character and flow in a way that marks her narration as distinctive.
I whole heartedly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the Italian language and the Italian approach to life.
Outstanding on all levels.
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- khaledalyami001
- 08-16-16
I loved it!!
I enjoyed this books that I finished in less than 4 days. It is very informative and full of interesting and funny stories!!
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3 people found this helpful
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- S. Gharda-ward MD
- 06-06-18
Not only language
This book is full of history and culture as well as a complete investigation of the language in history, film and dialects.
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2 people found this helpful
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- JudaJuda
- 11-13-22
Bella Italiano
This was a wonderful story and adventure into Italy ..Italians and the language.. so much history about the language and other tidbits very fun.. Dianne research and adventures very informative and entertaining ❣️🇮🇹
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- Anyuta
- 02-06-23
Great introduction to Italian language
And Italian history!
The narrator was superb! Great story and performance, will listen again soon!
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- Ciro Silva
- 09-21-16
Highly Recomended!!!
What did you love best about La Bella Lingua?
Fantastic way to learn a new language: listening to someone narrating her/his experience with the idiom while living in the country where it's spoken. Best of both worlds; learning the language while hearing witty observations on local customs and history.
What was one of the most memorable moments of La Bella Lingua?
Impossible to pick a memorable moment, since the author trully loves La Bella Lingua and the Italian people.
Have you listened to any of Suzanne Toren’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
Suzanne Toren's narration adds a lot to the book, with her perfect Italian pronunciation.
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
As we are commenting about the wonderful Italians, it's impossible not to have an emotional reaction to the engaging narration.
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3 people found this helpful