Heather Broster
The other day, my husband and I decided to watch Johnny Stecchino, an Italian comedy from the early 1990s directed by and starring the fantastically funny Roberto Benigni. The story follows Dante, a naive yet kind-hearted bus driver and part-time banana thief, whose uncanny physical resemblance to Sicilian mobster-turned-police informant Johnny Stecchino lands him in …
One way of saying fearless or undaunted in Italian is impavido. It comes from the Latin impavidus which is a combination of the prefix im- and pavidus (coward). Impavido is the masculine form. The feminine version is impavida, and their respective plural forms are impavidi and impavide. Il principe impavido sfidò il drago per liberare …
If you want to tell someone that the answer they have given is correct in Italian, you can use the phrase Hai ragione. Let’s take a quick look at how this phrase is formed: hai is the second-person singular form of the verb avere (to have). It literally means you have. The pronoun tu (you) …
You may be surprised to learn that a word Italians commonly used to denote the toilet bowl is water! It was abbreviated from the dated English term water closet, which is just another name for a typical flush toilet, or more broadly, the small room containing said toilet. Be aware, however, that in Italian the …
The verb gattonare in Italian has two meanings, depending on whether you are describing a human being or an animal. When a human, or more specifically a baby, is the subject, gattonare means to crawl. Mia figlia ha cominciato a gattonare molto presto. My daughter started crawling very early. When talking about predatory animals such …
The word for bottle in Italian is the similar-sounding bottiglia (feminine, plural: bottiglie). Unlike many Italian words which can be traced directly to Latin, bottiglia comes from the Spanish botilla meaning wine vessel. Drinks generally come in two types: bottiglie di plastica (plastic bottles) or bottiglie di vetro (glass bottles). When talking about small bottles …