Almidano Artifoni was born in the city of Bergamo, in
Lombardy, in 1873. He taught at the Berlitz School in Hamburg
in Germany for five years in the 1890s, eventually becoming
its director. In 1900 he moved to Trieste to open the local
Berlitz branch, and a few years later he became important in
the life of the penniless James Joyce, who arrived in Trieste
in October 1904 with his pregnant partner Nora Barnacle.
Artifoni lessened Joyce's hardships by assigning him a
position as an English teacher at the branch office he had
just opened in Pola, southeast of Trieste on the Istrian
coast, and soon afterward in the headquarters of Trieste
itself. In 1907 Artifoni left the direction of the Berlitz
School in the hands of two other teachers. He taught
accounting at the Revoltella Higher School of Commerce and
helped Joyce to obtain the role of English teacher in the same
institute from 1910 to 1913.
Joyce put Artifoni in Stephen Hero as the character
Charles Artifoni, Stephen's Italian teacher at University
College, Dublin: "He chose Italian as his optional subject,
partly from a desire to read Dante seriously, and partly to
escape the crush of French and German lectures. No-one else in
the college studied Italian and every second morning he came
to the college at ten o’clock and went up to Father Artifoni’s
bedroom. Father Artifoni was an intelligent little moro,
who came from Bergamo, a town in Lombardy. He had clean lively
eyes and a thick full mouth." The physical details seem to
have been inspired by Artifoni, but some of the personal
qualities that Joyce assigned to the character, as well as his
given name of Charles, came from his actual teacher at
UCD—another sympathetic Italian man, this one Sicilian, named
Charles Ghezzi. When Joyce reshaped his cumbrous early
novel into A Portrait of the Artist, he let Father
Ghezzi appear under his own name.
The Artifoni of Ulysses may also have been modeled in
part on the Neapolitan maestro Luigi Denza,
professor of voice at the Royal Academy of Music in London and
composer of the well-known song Funiculì funiculà. In
1904 Denza chaired the jury of the prestigious Dublin Feis
Ceoil singing competition. Joyce, who had a beautiful but
untrained tenor voice, had started taking singing lessons from
an Italian teacher named Benedetto Palmieri, also born
in Naples, but he ran out of money to pay for the lessons.
John McCormack, the great Irish tenor who had won the gold
medal at the Feis Ceoil in 1903 and who had seen his career
soar as a result, beginning with a year-long scholarship to
study voice in Italy, urged Joyce to enter the competition.
Joyce did, and he sang splendidly, but he grandiosely refused
to do the sight-reading exercise at the end because he had
never learned that skill—even though he knew it was a
requirement of the competition.
According to Ellmann's account of the evening, "The startled
judge had intended to give Joyce the gold medal....The rules
prevented his awarding Joyce anything but honorable mention,
but when the second place winner was disqualified Joyce
received the bronze medal.... Denza in his report urged that
Joyce study seriously, and spoke of him with so much
admiration to Palmieri that the latter, who had made the
mistake of refusing to help McCormack, offered to train Joyce
for three years for nothing in return for a share of his
concert earnings for ten years. But Joyce's ardor for a
singing career had already begun to lapse; the tedious
discipline did not suit him, and to be a second McCormack was
not so attractive as to be a first Joyce" (152).
Ellmann's judgment seems overstated, because when he was
living in Trieste Joyce continued to explore the possibility
of training to become a professional singer. In October 1908
he enrolled at the Trieste Conservatory of Music and became a
pupil of the maestro Romeo Bartoli, who had
features similar to how Joyce describes Artifoni. Bartoli
confirmed that he was gifted with a rather good voice and
promised him that he would be ready to go on stage within two
or three years. Joyce gave Bartoli some English lessons and it
is possible that the two exchanged professional services in
something like the manner described in Eumaeus and Ithaca,
where Bloom envisions Stephen becoming a professional singer
and Molly acquiring "correct Italian pronunciation,"
the two of them singing "duets in Italian with the accent
perfectly true to nature." In reality, Joyce's singing
career was limited to the performance of a quintet from Wagner's Der
Meistersinger at the Conservatory's end-of-year concert
on 3 July 1909.
Wandering Rocks presents a very warm interaction
between Stephen and Artifoni on College Green as the latter
stands waiting for a tram:
— Ma! Almidano
Artifoni said. [But!—i.e., Who knows!?]
He gazed over
Stephen's shoulder at Goldsmith's knobby poll.
— Anch'io
ho avuto di queste idee, Almidano Artifoni
said, quand'ero giovine come Lei. Eppoi mi sono
convinto che il mondo è una bestia. È peccato. Perchè la
sua voce... sarebbe un cespite di rendita, via. Invece,
Lei si sacrifica. [I too had these ideas when I
was young like you. Then I was convinced that the world is a
beast. It's a shame. Because your voice... it would be a
financial asset, come on! Instead, you are sacrificing
yourself.]
— Sacrifizio
incruento, Stephen said smiling, swaying
his ashplant in slow swingswong from its midpoint, lightly. [A
bloodless sacrifice.]
— Speriamo,
the round mustachioed face said pleasantly. Ma, dia
retta a me. Ci rifletta. [Let's hope so. But
listen to me. Think about it.]
By the stern stone
hand of Grattan, bidding halt, an Inchicore tram unloaded
straggling Highland soldiers of a band.
— Ci rifletteró, Stephen
said, glancing down the solid trouserleg. [I'll think about
it.]
— Ma, sul serio,
eh? Almidano Artifoni said. [But seriously, eh?]
His heavy hand took
Stephen's firmly. Human eyes. They gazed curiously an instant
and turned quickly towards a Dalkey tram.
— Eccolo, Almidano
Artifoni said in friendly haste. Venga a trovarmi e ci
pensi. Addio, caro. [Here it is—i.e., the tram.
Come visit me, and think about it. Goodbye, dear friend.]
— Arrivederla,
maestro, Stephen said, raising his hat when his
hand was freed. E grazie. [Goodbye, Master.
And thanks.]
— Di che? Almidano
Artifoni said. Scusi, eh? Tante belle cose! [For
what? Excuse me, eh?—i.e., for having to run. So many
beautiful things!—i.e., My best wishes!]
Amplified by association with three, four, or possibly even
five other well-meaning and helpful Italian men, Almidano
Artifoni represented for this Irish writer a positive figure
that he wanted to remember in his works and, above all, in his
masterpiece. The "clean lively eyes" of Stephen Hero
become "Human eyes" in Wandering Rocks. Artifoni's touch is welcome to Stephen,
and so is his advice. When he briefly returns in Circe
as a hallucinated figment, he says somewhat aggressively, "Ci
rifletta. Lei rovina tutto" (Think about it.
You're ruining everything). But at the end of Eumaeus
Leopold Bloom presents yet one more layered evocation of
Artifoni, warmly human, physically supportive, and not at all
accusatory. Bloom's efforts to convince Stephen to make money
on the concert stage might seem merely ignorant and venal,
were it not for the personal history that Joyce wove into the
figure of Almidano Artifoni.
[2023] Joyce's dense layering of real people into this one
fictive character makes life tough for his commentators.
Gifford notes that Artifoni gave Joyce a job in Berlitz
schools, but he does not mention Ghezzi, Denza, or Palmieri.
Vivien Igoe gives a biography of Artifoni, noting that he
"never visited Dublin," but likewise ignores other possible
models. Slote and his collaborators say that "Artifoni is
based on Joyce's Italian instructor in Dublin, Father Charles
Ghezzi, S.J." and they note that he used his name in place of
Ghezzi's "in Stephen Hero, but not in A Portrait,"
but they do not mention Denza or Palmieri. Ian Gunn and Clive
Hart, in James Joyce's Dublin, infer that the
fictional Artifoni "is modelled" on Palmieri. They do not
mention Ghezzi or Denza. No one mentions Bartoli.
