Heather Broster
For the first year of my son’s life, he had a fairly strong preference for his father, constantly wanting to be held by him and searching for him when he wasn’t around. Now that he’s a little older, he has become much more of a mammone, which is the word for a mama’s boy (or …
If you’re planning on visiting Italy, there are a few basic needs you will want to express in Italian. Most importantly (or perhaps second only to finding the public facilities), you need to know how to go about filling your empty stomach up with food. The first step? To tell someone that you’re hungry! In …
The most I’ve ever eaten in one sitting was at a wedding (matrimonio) in the south of Italy. I made the amateur mistake of filling up on the first course – which, to be fair, was a mouthwatering array of freshly caught seafood – only to discover that there were seven courses to go! By …
Before anyone jumps on me for writing about what is essentially a North American tradition, let me take a moment to say that I know Thanksgiving isn’t celebrated in Italy, nor does it show any sign of taking root in Italian culture. That said, I felt it was important to cover this greeting because a …
This coming Thursday is Thanksgiving (Festa del Ringraziamento) in the United States, and since many of our readers are Italian Americans, we decided to dedicate today’s word to the humble centrepiece of the Thanksgiving dinner table: the tacchino (turkey). Tacchino is a masculine noun ending in -o, making its plural form tacchini. Note that the …
Before moving to Italy, I was completely unfamiliar with the finocchio, an aromatic yellow-flowered plant of the parsley family with feathery leaves and gentle aniseed flavour. It has since become one of my favourite winter vegetables! Finocchio is a masculine noun, and the plural is finocchi. un finocchioil finocchio dei finocchii finocchi There are many …