Archive for March, 2015
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes … And Our Wallets! Posted by Geoff on Mar 30, 2015
Here’s a little article which I found in the Italian press the other day. The article itself is not exactly headline material, but it does serve as a useful tool for a bit of grammatical analysis. Rather than translate everything, I’ve picked out some key grammatical point and elaborated on them. N.B. to those of…
Fuoco! Posted by Serena on Mar 26, 2015
Every cloud has a silver lining, or, if you’re a writer, every cloud has a little story to tell. For example: Venerdì sera stavo preparando la cena quando Geoff, che stava lavorando al computer, mi ha chiamato: “ Serena, puoi controllare il fuoco per piacere? Sta facendo un mucchio di rumore”. Così mi sono asciugata…
A Bit More About Tanto Posted by Serena on Mar 24, 2015
Really … more about tanto?! Sì, è vero, c’è tanto tanto! (Yes, it’s true, there’s a lot of tanto!). In our last article on the topic Every Now and Then we looked at five of the most common uses of tanto. Today, I’m going to delve down into the deep dark recesses of il mio…
Understanding Directions in Italian Posted by Geoff on Mar 23, 2015
Last week I published an article about Asking For Directions. The article itself was fairly basic, and probably not much different from what you might expect to find in a typical Italian phrase book. But now comes the real challenge … making sense of the reply! To that end I’m going to provide you with…
Una Canzone per tutti i Papà Posted by Serena on Mar 19, 2015
Oggi, il 19 marzo, è la Festa del Papà. Per celebrare questa festa ho scelto una canzone che parla di un papà, un papà vero. Il titolo della canzone è Viaggio Con Te ed è scritta dalla cantante Laura Pausini. Il padre di Laura Pausini è stato un musicista di piano bar e ha sempre incoraggiato ed aiutato Laura a diventare…
Spaghetti alla Carbonara Posted by Serena on Mar 17, 2015
There are several classic Italian pasta based dishes that have become well know throughout the world. One of these I described in my recent post la pasta all’Amatriciana. Another famous, but often misinterpreted, Italian pasta dish is gli spaghetti alla Carbonara. Origins: There are many stories about the origins of this dish. The most credible…
Asking For Directions – Part One Posted by Geoff on Mar 16, 2015
When I was in my early twenties I spent 3 months travelling by foot, bus, train, and facendo l’autostop (hitch hiking) around the UK and mainland Europe. At that time I was pretty much monolingual, and yet I managed to successfully navigate myself through at least ten non-English speaking countries without too many problems, before…