From a bad moon to Orlando's wits: the Moon in Italian idioms
A crooked moon, asking for the moon, the moon in the well: origins of Italian lunar idioms, from the Disciplina clericalis to Astolfo in Orlando furioso.
The Italian language keeps a small catalogue of expressions linked to the Moon. We say that someone «has a crooked moon» when they are in a bad mood, that they «live in the world of the moon» when they are absent-minded, that they «ask for the moon» when they demand the impossible. Behind these phrases lie ancient beliefs about lunar influence, folk tales and even a famous episode of chivalric literature, which made the Moon the keeper of lost things.
Moods and distractions
The expressions linking the Moon to mood derive from the idea that she acts upon the mind. «Having the moon» or «having the moon sideways» means being irritable and unpredictable, like those once called lunatics. «Being in the world of the moon», on the other hand, describes someone whose head is elsewhere, far from practical matters: the Moon becomes the realm of fantasy par excellence, distant and unreachable, where dreamers take refuge.
Other phrases play on distance and impossibility. «Asking for the moon» or «promising the moon» means requesting or guaranteeing something that can never be obtained; «barking at the moon» means protesting uselessly against what cannot be reached, like the dog howling at the lunar disc to no effect. Equivalent expressions exist in many European languages, a sign of a shared imagination that long predates space travel.
The moon in the well
«Showing someone the moon in the well» means deceiving them into believing something impossible. The expression recalls a type of tale found in many traditions, in which a fool mistakes the Moon's reflection in the water for the Moon herself and tries to fish her out, or is persuaded by a trickster that the reflection is a round cheese. Similar stories appear in collections of medieval tales, in Eastern folklore and in European fairy tales.
One of the oldest European versions is found in the Disciplina clericalis, a collection of exemplary tales composed in the early twelfth century by Petrus Alfonsi, a converted Jew of Iberian origin: a fox persuades a wolf that the lunar reflection at the bottom of a well is a cheese, and so manages to get him to go down in his place. The tale then passed into many literary and oral traditions, until it settled into the Italian idiom.
Astolfo and Orlando's wits
The most famous image of the Moon as the place of lost things comes from Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso, published in 1516 and in its final version in 1532. In the thirty-fourth canto the paladin Astolfo, having reached the Earthly Paradise on the back of the hippogriff, rises to the Moon with Saint John the Evangelist in the fiery chariot of the prophet Elijah. Up there he finds a valley where everything lost on Earth is gathered: fame, time, promises, desires.
Among these things are countless flasks full of wits, each bearing the name of its owner. Astolfo recognises Orlando's, who has gone mad for love of Angelica, and brings it back to Earth to restore his reason; he also recovers part of his own wits, which he did not know he had lost. The episode, at once ironic and melancholy, fixed in the Italian imagination the idea of the Moon as a storehouse of lost reason.
The idioms about the Moon tell a cultural history in miniature: the ancient belief in lunar influence on mood, the unreachable distance of the sky, foolishness punished in the tales, the ironic fantasy of a Renaissance poet. Each time we use them, almost without thinking, we repeat fragments of an imagination that has crossed the centuries and the languages of Europe.