Cuccagna
Cuccagna is one of my favorite Italian words. An LJ user recently asked what it meant after I used it in my response to a comment she had made. Cuccagna (pronounced coo-CAHN-yah) simply means a land or place of contentment and happiness, where all things go right. I suppose it is close in meaning to "Utopia," except even a Utopia implies the need for co-operation and responsibility and fulfilling one’s work-role before everything goes well. In a cuccagna, it’s all play and joy without duty or responsibility, a life of automatic peaches and cream in a land of pre-ordained milk and honey. You may remember that Pinocchio and company found a temporary cuccagna, free from schooling, until they began metamorphosing into circus donkeys.
There is the English word Cockaigne (Cockayne) which conveys the same notion but I do not believe this is now very widely used. On the other hand every Italian knows what a cuccagna might be. Edward Elgar composed a popular Cockaigne Overture. "Cockaigne" was a term used by moralists of the day as a metaphor for gluttony and drunkenness. (Is it more than coincidence too that some folks’ Cockaigne might derive from cocaine?) Many British used the term facetiously to refer to London. For Ted, my late friend and Anglophile, the city of London was indeed the true Cockaigne.
The Italian author-journalist Matilde Serao wrote a book called Il paese della cuccagna, The Land of Cockaigne about her city of Naples, but the intent was ironic, since Naples, despite its aching beauty, was the antithesis of cuccagna. For most it was the epicenter of misery to the accompaniment of mandolins. Many Italians emigrated en masse from that cuccagna or from neighboring cuccagne.
In Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist film masterpiece Sciuscià/Shoeshine, set in Rome, a bunch of kids are at a movie being shown to them in the harsh juvenile prison they inhabit. One of them comments, "They feed you, they show you movies, what else can anyone want?…è una cuccagna!" His sarcasm is bitter.
The craving for cuccagna has spawned the futile human hope for an afterlife. There will be a cuccagna for those who have nobly suffered this earthly travail, religions tell us. I know for sure there is no cuccagna in the here; I am certain too there is no cuccagna in the presumed hereafter.
For me the most poignant example of the human quest for cuccagna occurred in a 1912 Edison silent film I happened to catch on a TCM film-preservation series. It was called The Land Beyond the Sunset. It ran a mere fourteen minutes. In it a 10-year-old city-newsboy named Joe lives at home with an abusive alcoholic grandmother and is unfamiliar with any joy. He wears rags, he sleeps on the floor in a slum room. One day he is given the opportunity, arranged by a childrens’ welfare organization called Fresh Air Fund, to visit the country for a picnic-day of play and frolic and being read stories from wondrous books, including one called "The Land Beyond the Sunset."
In a few hours the experience alters his perceptions of the world, gives him a brief encounter with a happiness never previously felt. In an ambiguous finale, he gets into a small boat by the lake and floats off by himself toward the horizon, seeking for himself that land beyond the sunset of the storybooks he carries with him, seeking that more permanent cuccagna.
There is the English word Cockaigne (Cockayne) which conveys the same notion but I do not believe this is now very widely used. On the other hand every Italian knows what a cuccagna might be. Edward Elgar composed a popular Cockaigne Overture. "Cockaigne" was a term used by moralists of the day as a metaphor for gluttony and drunkenness. (Is it more than coincidence too that some folks’ Cockaigne might derive from cocaine?) Many British used the term facetiously to refer to London. For Ted, my late friend and Anglophile, the city of London was indeed the true Cockaigne.
The Italian author-journalist Matilde Serao wrote a book called Il paese della cuccagna, The Land of Cockaigne about her city of Naples, but the intent was ironic, since Naples, despite its aching beauty, was the antithesis of cuccagna. For most it was the epicenter of misery to the accompaniment of mandolins. Many Italians emigrated en masse from that cuccagna or from neighboring cuccagne.
In Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist film masterpiece Sciuscià/Shoeshine, set in Rome, a bunch of kids are at a movie being shown to them in the harsh juvenile prison they inhabit. One of them comments, "They feed you, they show you movies, what else can anyone want?…è una cuccagna!" His sarcasm is bitter.
The craving for cuccagna has spawned the futile human hope for an afterlife. There will be a cuccagna for those who have nobly suffered this earthly travail, religions tell us. I know for sure there is no cuccagna in the here; I am certain too there is no cuccagna in the presumed hereafter.
For me the most poignant example of the human quest for cuccagna occurred in a 1912 Edison silent film I happened to catch on a TCM film-preservation series. It was called The Land Beyond the Sunset. It ran a mere fourteen minutes. In it a 10-year-old city-newsboy named Joe lives at home with an abusive alcoholic grandmother and is unfamiliar with any joy. He wears rags, he sleeps on the floor in a slum room. One day he is given the opportunity, arranged by a childrens’ welfare organization called Fresh Air Fund, to visit the country for a picnic-day of play and frolic and being read stories from wondrous books, including one called "The Land Beyond the Sunset."
In a few hours the experience alters his perceptions of the world, gives him a brief encounter with a happiness never previously felt. In an ambiguous finale, he gets into a small boat by the lake and floats off by himself toward the horizon, seeking for himself that land beyond the sunset of the storybooks he carries with him, seeking that more permanent cuccagna.