Archive for the year 2009
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…
La Camera di Canaletto? Posted by Serena on Apr 4, 2009
Speaking of misleading words (see my recent series ‘Misleading Word of the Day’), another word that I have often seen included in lists of so called ‘falsi amici’ (false friends) or false cognates is ‘camera’. I don’t however consider ‘camera’ a ‘false friend’ but rather a ‘helpful friend’ because it is one of the many…
Meglio o Migliore? Posted by Serena on Apr 2, 2009
I recently received an interesting e.mail from a reader saying that he had never realized that “adverbs can also function as adjectives and nouns” and he asked me to focus in particular on “bene, meglio, male e peggio in comparison with buono, migliore, cattivo e peggiore”. I must admit that I had a few moments of panic…