In Ann Harleman’s new novel, Tell Me, Signora, recently widowed Kate heads to Italy, having won a fellowship to research a 16th-century female painter. The artist’s colony is populated by people from the around the world. The result is a novel that does what novels do best: what Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin called heteroglossia, or varied language. With Italians, Americans, Serbians, and other nationalities, Harleman’s successfully captures the variegated syntax and speech patterns of her characters. Immersed in this bath of language, Kate is transformed.

Harleman, who has been to Italy more than a dozen times, often for prolonged stays at artist residencies, speaks Italian, or what she calls a work-in-progress Italian. She knows enough to have cultivated an ear for different speech rhythms. The most obvious difference between English and Italian, she says, is that Italian nouns are gendered. But what stands out even more for Harleman is the fluidity of Italian syntax.

“The fluidity comes from a greater array of options for conveying a given proposition, or idea, without adding expressive meaning,” says Harleman. Expressive meaning is a person’s attitude toward an idea. “For instance, to ask a question in Italian, you can simply change the intonation to an upward curve. ‘Mia sorella e` arrivata’ means ‘My sister has arrived.’ That can be changed into a question through tone: ‘Mia sorella e` arrivata?’ In English the normal way of forming a question is to invert subject and verb. If you keep the same word order and use intonation alone, ‘My sister has arrived?’ it’s not a neutral question. Now there’s an element of expressive meaning—the speaker’s disbelief or surprise or need for verification.”

For Harleman, this fluidity in language affected her writing and the story.

“In Italian, I’m warmer, funnier, more relaxed, more joyful,” she says. “The sound of Italian is champagne to my brain. I try never to evaluate or analyze while I’m writing—the critic brain (which Tolstoy defined as ‘immune to art’) kills the creative brain. But now, looking back, with the offspring of my creative brain safely between covers, I’d say that the Italian setting and ambiance and language actually influenced not only the sentence structure but also the plot and themes of Tell Me, Signora.”

When Kate first arrives in Genoa, she is brusque and reserved, cloaked in grief from the recent death of her husband. She’s determined to revive her career in archaeology and wants to avoid all emotional involvement. Her syntax, her body language, and her responses reflect this attitude.

At the Italian airport, Kate is asked out for a drink by an American man. Her dialogue is blunt, direct. “I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ve got barely three months here, and a lot to do.”

Early in the novel, Kate hears a voice in her head, a voice she christens “Ceiling-Katherine.” The voice uses the traditional English syntactical structure—subject/verb/object—or shifts to imperatives. From a dark corner of the bedroom, Ceiling-Katherine says, “You’re fine! Go back to sleep.” When she thinks of her deceased husband, Ceiling-Katherine admonishes her, “No time for this!”

Slowly, Italy and the language work their magic. When her luggage doesn’t arrive, Kate heads to an Italian shop and buys new clothes, items she wouldn’t normally purchase: silk underwear and bra, black corduroy jeans, and a turquoise sweater. When she looks at herself she sees not Kate but Caterina, a woman who can surprise, who is alive and interesting. Her transformation is sped along when she takes Italian lessons from a young man named Nico, and a flirtation zings through her. Sentences that convey her thoughts and dialogue become more sensual, filled with more emotion and imagery.

Here is Kate with Nico, who is showing her the city.

He grabbed my hand and we squeezed between stopped automobiles, ducking under a red-and-white-striped barrier with a sign reading “VIETATO.” Forbidden. When I pointed it out, Nico grinned. “Just a suggestion. Dipende.”

When Kate visits a museum and is allowed to see one of the painter’s works of art, she is deeply moved. Her sentences, again, capture the change. They are more emotional, with rich imagery.

It was like coming to a place that you’ve never been to before but that somehow you know—a place you might have seen in a dream. The cottage with its white-washed walls and climbing roses. The lion-colored meadow where it stood. The trees that sheltered it, with fruit glowing among their leaves. The sunlit suggestion of other dwellings further down the slope.

Kate encounters Kosovar refugees who speak little English. Harleman captures the rhythms of a non-native English speaker as Genta tells Kate about the war and witnessing the rape of a girl.

“She is no longer suit… suitable for marriage. She is dirty—the castle of the enemy. Her grandmother tell her, Better dead and under the ground. Since that day she never see her family more.”

Articles are dropped, verb tenses don’t align with the subject, and there’s a struggle to find the correct word.

Kate is in Italy to research Sofonisba Anguissola, a real Italian artist who lived from 1532 to 1625. Whenever Kate comes into physical contact with an object that Sofonisba touched, the painter inhabits Kate’s imagination: Kate sees and experiences the world through Sofonisba’s perspective. When Kate heads to the Mediterranean, certain that Sofonisba gazed out at it, she is visited by the Italian painter:

She stands on a promontory with her drawing board under one arm and watches the water lick the rocks. Is that what I shall do, in the end? she wonders. Return home, to Genoa and thence to Cremona? But Papa is dead, and all my sisters gone. Home is not home, now.

“To create the language for these visions—nine of them spaced throughout the novel,” says Harleman, “I shifted to third person and present tense, and concocted a voice that is somewhat antique, somewhat Italian—but still accessible to modern readers. Lots of research went into getting to know Sofonisba well enough to do this—Including a trip to Sicily to touch her gravestone.”

I asked Harleman to pick three favorite sentences. In the first sentence, Kate is listening to three Kosovar refugees who are hiding in Italy. Kate has been asked to help them escape to America.

If Guardia boats chase them, scafisti throw smallest child into the sea.

“This sentence encapsulates the experience of the Kosovar refugees,” says Harleman, “and when Kate (who loves children) hears it, it’s the moment—without her realizing it—that she begins to consider risking her career and her future to help them.”

I liked this sentence, too. The if-then construction implies logic—if this condition is met, then this will happen. And yet the content of Harleman’s sentence defies logic—how could the smallest child be killed? The syntax leaves the reader stunned.

“You’re blushing.” Nico trailed a finger along my collarbone and between my breasts. “When you come, you blush here.”

“Sex!” said Harleman. “I think every novel should have some, just to show the sheer joy of being alive. But especially this novel, since the refugee thread is quite dark. Also this sentence shows Nico’s tenderness and playfulness—such great qualities in a lover.”

The pacing also works well, the blend of dialogue with the sensuality of Nico’s touch, which creates its own build to Nico’s final dialogue.

In the final sentence, Kate is channeling Sofonisba, who has fallen in love.

Above them the midnight sky is brilliant with stars, a boundless field with a hundred seeds of brightness.

“This sentence shows the sensuous delights of the Italian landscape/seascape,” says Harleman. “At the same time it’s a metaphor for the freedom (‘boundless’) and creativity (‘seeds’) and simple happiness (‘brightness’) that Sofonisba is about to claim, for the first time in her life, at the age of 47.”

The powerful imagery of this sentence mimics Sofonisba’s change, and also Kate’s, who experiences the alchemy of Italy and Italian.