Bernardo Bertolucci is one of the greatest Italian directors; everybody loves his The Conformist (Il conformista), but nobody seems to care about The Spider’s Stratagem (Strategia del ragno), which he made immediately afterwards and which blew me away when I saw it in New York decades ago. Last October, irritated by its unavailability on DVD/Blu-ray, I finally gave in and rented it from Prime Video and was as impressed as before. It’s about a guy who returns to the fictional town of Tara, where his father was killed in 1936, and tries to untangle what happened; what’s important for our purposes is that there’s a scene almost a minute long in which two townspeople have an animated discussion in Emilian (the subtitle says “Emilian dialect”), which of course excited me. I haven’t posted about it because I recorded the passage on my phone and kept hoping I’d be able to decipher enough to quote at least a phrase or two, but it’s defeated me, so I mention it in the hope that someone out there will have access to a screenplay in Italian or some other source that reproduces what the guys are saying.
The Italian Wikipedia article Lingua emiliana says:
L’unico film interamente girato in una varietà emiliana è L’uomo che verrà (2009) di Giorgio Diritti, che fa ricorso al dialetto bolognese nella sua versione originale. L’amministrazione comunale di Piacenza, con un finanziamento della Regione Emilia-Romagna, ha invece prodotto I strass e la seda (2020), la prima serie web in emiliano, i cui attori si esprimono in diversi dialetti del Piacentino.
(Note the almost meaningless “invece,” which Italians toss into sentences as if adding salt to pasta water; I complained about Ann Goldstein’s translating it as “instead” here.) I think they should at least mention the Bertolucci, surely the most prominent showcase that form of Italian has had. And it may be worth mentioning that The Spider’s Stratagem is based on “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” [Tema del traidor y del héroe] by Borges.
Does your Prime stream offer the option of Italian CC subtitles?
Good question — I don’t know.
This site notes, “…Tara (dal nome della proprietà della famiglia O’Hara in Via col vento), situata in un luogo qualunque della Bassa emiliano-lombarda (in realtà Sabbioneta, provincia di Mantova).” Mantuan is the northernmost Emilian dialect, just outside of Emilia-Romagna, in Lombardy. I wonder if the extras speaking Emilian were local.
the most prominent showcase that form of Italian
Emilian has a good case for being its own language, not a dialect. Spanish seems to me closer to standard Italian than Emilian is. Certainly the difference between standard Portuguese and standard Castilian is a lot narrower than Emilian and modern standard Italian.
Yes, that’s why the Wikipedia article is called “Emilian language.” (Compare Languages of Italy.)
1-Most of the “Gallo-Italian” varieties of Northern Italy have (or had, until recently) a prestige variety centered around a major regional center (Genoa in the case of Ligurian varieties, Venice in the case of Venetian, Turin in the case of Piedmontese…), but the Emilian + Romagnol varieties do not have one (This is because the major city in the region, Bologna, was linguistically Tuscanized quite early: I think it and Rome were the first cities outside of Tuscany where a transplanted form of Tuscan became the L1 of their inhabitants). Since Emilian + Romagnol exhibits heavy internal diversity, getting an accurate translation of the dialogue may well prove to be…challenging, to say the least.
2-Emilian being utterly incomprehensible to L1 speakers of Standard Italian, the meaning of the dialogue would have been irrelevant to movie viewers. Thus, it is possible (if Y’s guess above is true) that the Emilian-speaking locals in the scene were asked to improvise/ad lib a conversation in Emilian (And that it was included in the movie solely to give some realistic-sounding local color). If so, it may prove VERY challenging indeed to find out what the meaning of said exchange was…
3-Emilian + Romagnol dialects probably deserve -in a sense- to be called “languages” even more than other Romance varieties indigenous to the Italian peninsula. They carried through syncope and apocope of unstressed vowels to an unusually advanced degree, such that, unlike varieties such as Venetian or Genoese or Sicilian or Neapolitan, where the cognates with Standard Tuscan are easily perceived by normal human beings (i.e. non-linguists), Emilian + Romagnol varieties are often -in “folk perception”- not considered to be really “Italian” at all. This is because these sound changes have made most cognates with Tuscan unrecognizable (Indeed, some varieties have heavy consonant clusters that one associates with Slavic rather than Romance).
4-As this is my first comment of 2026, I will wish a Happy New Year to all.
Emilian being utterly incomprehensible to L1 speakers of Standard Italian, the meaning of the dialogue would have been irrelevant to movie viewers.
Oh, I figured that — I was just hoping against hope.
And a Happy New Year to you as well!
As the resident Emilian, I feel both delighted by the attention devoted to my region’s language, and compelled to comment, even though much has already been said in Etienne’s excellent post.
On his point 1, an additional reason for the lack of a regional koine is the lack of political unity: in marked contrast to Liguria, Piedmont, Lombardy, Tuscany, or the Veneto, all of which roughly correspond to pre-unitary states centered around a major city, Emilia-Romagna remained fragmented in several entities until Italian unification, and Bologna — despite its size, cultural prestige, and geographically central position — never rose to the rank of a regional capital. Indeed, as Daniele Vitali (the outstanding expert on Emilian+Romagnol dialects) argues, the unifying factor in E-R was rather the via Emilia itself, connecting most major towns in the region and acting as an axis along which linguistic innovations could propagate.
On point 3: yes, widespread loss of unstressed vowels, along with various kinds of shifts and diphthongizations in the stressed ones, gave the more progressive varieties of Emilian+Romagnol a phonological ‘look’ very unlike Italian. Structurally, however, they are not so different from other “Gallo-Italian” languages, and in some respects even more conservative (e.g. the Eastern half of the region preserves the remote past, which is utterly lost in most of the North, and therefore in Northern spoken Italian).
As regards the dialogue in Bertolucci’s film, I find it not terribly easy to understand. That was expected to some extent, since given the film’s (vague) location and Bertolucci’s roots in Parma, the local variety would be much more North-Western* than the one I’m more familiar with. I note, at any rate, that apart from that scene the locals’ dialogue is sprinkled with dialect words and expressions.
L’uomo che verrà is a very fine movie (about the Nazi massacre in Marzabotto), although its dialect has been criticized for being not quite right geographically (the characters speak city Bolognese, whereas in the mountains a different variety is used), and above all for its sloppy morphosyntax.
Diritti made recourse to (yet another variety of) Emilian also in 2020’s Volevo nascondermi, a biopic of the painter Antonio Ligabue.
*Not sure, however, if actually Mantuan. The actor playing Gaibazzi, for instance, hailed — as I learn from Wikipedia — from Fidenza, near Parma, where a fairly typical form of Western Emilian is spoken. Mantuan, on the other hand, although traditionally lumped with Emilian in Italian dialectology, seems actually to be a slightly peculiar form of Eastern Lombard. The fact that people in the province of Mantua, especially South of the Po, identify more with Emilia on a cultural and gastronomic level doubtlessly plays a role in the linguistic (mis)classification.
@Roberto Batisti: Mantuan, on the other hand, although traditionally lumped with Emilian in Italian dialectology, seems actually to be a slightly peculiar form of Eastern Lombard.
Interesting. The English WP article on Emilian includes Mantuan, but says it “has a strong Lombard influence.”
The same article has a video of a person speaking Emilian, apparently from a written text. I wonder (partly because of his name) if he is an L2 speaker.
The speaker of Lombard in its WP article sounds like he has native fluency. I have to say, just listening to those two recordings, I don’t know if I could distinguish Emilian and Lombard by their phonolgy alone. They sound fairly similar to me (and utterly different from standard Italian.) The front rounded vowels and the nasalized ones give both languages a French flavor.
Maybe someone (rb) could help with the content?
What I hear (with gaps) is something like:
2: Niente fa’ ( or affa’ ?) 14.30
1: D[í?] me ufficia’mente 14.33:
2: Be’ vate! 14.35
1: à capire! 14.37
2: Be’ vatene! 14.38
1: Dime a tanto l’ va! 14.39
2: Be’ vatene! Eh be’. 14.40
1: Dime a tanto l’ va! Misci a pisci’ la roba e la roba. 14.43
1:? capire? E chiacchierA! 14.54
1: …ultima volta… 14.59
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-7M5ypxapwM
All pages in the Wikipedia incubator for E-R.
All pages in the Wikipedia incubator for E-R.
That’s wiktionary rather than Wikipedia, and not all the entries are Emilian words, eg chiesa.
The English wiktionary has 1,551 Emilian words.
eml.wikipedia claims to have 13808 articles
Oh. Oops. All the better.
If you haven’t seen it already, the page on the Fondazione Bertolucci site (https://bernardobertolucci.org/diary/a-proposito-di-strategia-del-ragno/) is interesting. Alas, you can only read the first few pages of the treatment and the screenplay, which doesn’t tell you much about the rest because the only dialect in the opening scenes is some (inevitably improvised) background chatter from extras.