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linguistically motivated. Yet he followedManzoni’s example and became himself
plus royaliste que le roi (parfois)
. Yet in his case, the notion of “rinsing one’s linguistic clothes in the waters of the Arno River” (God forbid!) did not become an onomasiological theorem, as it did with Manzoni. Also, let us not forget that, unlike Manzoni, who spent just enough time in Florence to do the rinsing, Artusi lived there from 1851 till the day of his death sixty years later.
    From a normative point of view, the so-called
questione della lingua
(that is, the quest for lexical and stylistic standards of expression), which dates back to the
Rinascimento
, has been, by and large, a sterile or marginal affair. (Not infrequently, in their creative practice, authors contradict or disregard their own most cherished linguistic beliefs.) Rekindled, for obvious political reasons, during the
Risorgimento
, it has resurfaced at almost regular intervals, as the manifestation of a misguided, when not decidedly undesired quest for national identity. As a yardstick to measure what should be used, kept, or dismissed by modern Italian speakers, strict Florentine observance has proven to be a rather ridiculous affair. Artusi himself more than once assumed his readers to be familiar with Florentine terms that were in fact far more obscure to them (and maybe even to the Florentines) than the regional variations he was determined to extirpate.
    While there can be no doubt of his appreciation of Bologna and its food, as well as the jovial character and the longevity of its inhabitants – so many are the praises he lavishes on them in
Scienza in cucina
52 – the vernacular and, above all, the gastronomic jargon used in that city is clearly not Artusi’s favorite
modus loquendi
. “What a strange language they speak in the learned Bologna!” he writes:
They call carpets rags; wine flasks gourds; sweetbreads milks. They say “zigàre” for “piangere” (to weep), and they call an unsavory, ugly, annoying woman, who would normally be termed a “calia” or a “scamonea” a “sagoma” (Italian for silhouette and, figuratively speaking, a funny person). In their restaurants you find “trefoils” (instead of truffles), Florentine style “chops” (instead of “steaks”),and other similar expressions that would drive anybody mad … When I first heard the Bolognese mention a crescent, I though they were talking about the moon. Instead they were discussing the schiacciata or focaccia, the ordinary fried dough cake that everybody recognizes and all know how to make. The only difference is that the Bolognese, to make theirs more tender and digestible, add a little lard when mixing the flour with cool water and salt. 53
     
    To fully appreciate Artusi’s idiosyncratic attitude, one should add that while “sagoma” enjoyed, as it does today for that matter, a wide currency in a number of northern Italian regions (including Artusi’s native Romagna), who has ever heard of “calia” and “scamonea” (yes, they can be looked up in a very good dictionary), apart from Artusi, of course, who wants to be more Florentine than his Florentine interlocutors? As a result, in
Scienza in cucina
, many lexical items remain whose origin, carefully tagged by phrases such as “in the language of,” “as they say in,” and so on, have no significant ties to the “language” of Florence. 54
    Even on the “Western front”, not all things were quiet. Artusi’s relentless campaign to “purify” gastronomic language of unwarranted francophonic infiltrations looks more like the symptomatic displacement of some discomfort than a legitimate linguistic concern: “How strange is the nomenclature associated with cuisine! Why white mountain,” writes Artusi to introduce the recipe for salted codfish Mont Blanc style (no. “8), “and not yellow mountain, as one would think from the color this dish takes when made? And how could the French,