Archive for April, 2009
A day in Firenze Posted by Serena on Apr 28, 2009
Last week here in Italy was Settimana della Cultura (Culture Week). Organized by the Italian Ministry of Arts, Settimana della Cultura offers free entry to all the national museums, so we decided to make the most of it and go to Firenze (Florence) for the first time in many years. On the Monday afternoon we went down to…
Parole Curiose, le soluzioni e una leggenda molto interessante. Posted by Serena on Apr 25, 2009
(Unusual words, the answers and a very interesting legend.) Well done everyone who had a go at my little quiz called ‘Parole Curiose’. It was, admittedly, quite hard and no one has attempted to answer all the questions. Let’s begin with the answers, and then I want to tell you a story related to one…
Buon Compleanno Roma! Posted by Serena on Apr 22, 2009
Yesterday, Tuesday the 21st April, Rome celebrated her birthday, and she’s is not doing too badly given her age: 2,762! Rome’s birthday is called il Natale di Roma: Natale comes from the Latin word natus, which is the past participle of the verb nascere meaning ‘to be born’. Nowadays we only use the word Natale for…
Parole Curiose Posted by Serena on Apr 19, 2009
One of the things that attracts a lot of people to the Italian language is its musicality. This is probably largely due to our rather ‘generous’ usage of vowels which enable scorrevolezza (fluency), well at least for us ‘natives’, students of Italian may disagree! Try this little scioglilingua (tongue twister) for example: Sopra la panca la capra…
Un po’ di giardinaggio Posted by Serena on Apr 16, 2009
Oggi facciamo un po’ di giardinaggio (today we are going to do a bit of gardening). At this time of year we are very busy working on the orto (vegetable garden). I wouldn’t say that we are big gardening experts, but we have had an orto for many years now and we manage to be self sufficient…
Un cappuccino per favore Posted by Serena on Apr 10, 2009
‘Un cappuccino per favore’ is probably one of the most common phrases learnt by tourists visiting Italy, yet as with many things Italian a cappuccino isn’t always what you think it is. To the tourist a cappuccino is nothing more than a fancy cup of coffee with foam on top, but how many realize that a cappuccino…
Abruzzo Posted by Serena on Apr 7, 2009
Once again Italy has been hit by an earthquake, this time the main victim being the town of L’Aquila in the region of Abruzzo. In terms of seismic activity we are a very high risk country, added to which we have a lot of old vulnerable buildings, but it’s easy to forget all that until…