Valentina Nicastro
Card games hold a special place in Italian culture. Walk into any bar from the Alps to Sicily, and you’ll likely spot a group of people gathered around a table, studying their cards with the seriousness of surgeons preparing for an operation. We play cards at Christmas, at the beach, at the park, on long …
Imagine you’re in Venice, leaning dangerously off a vaporetto to capture the perfect shot of the Grand Canal (hard to resist, I know), when the ticket controller rushes over shouting: Non è sicuro!(It’s not safe!). Then, in full tourist mode, you book a local guide for the afternoon. Don’t worry, your hotel receptionist reassures you, è una guida …
You’ve just landed in Italy. Obviously, you’ve already memorised all the food vocabulary (priorities!). Maybe you’ve also rehearsed a few survival phrases. But at some point (and trust me, it will happen) you’ll also need to explain how your body feels. And I’m not just talking about the “I think that fifth gelato was a …
Have you ever heard of a Tuscan pasta dish called gnudi? They’re basically ravioli with no pasta wrapper, just the delicious filling, served as it is. Naked dumplings, if you will. Which brings us—quite naturally and very deliciously—to today’s word: nudo. nudo In Italian, nudo can work both as an adjective and as a masculine …
Italian is a beautiful, musical language — we can all agree on that, right? But there’s a specific category of the vocabulary that’s honestly next-level. I’m talking about words for sounds, the ones that don’t just describe a rustling leaf or a crackling fire, they sound like one. From a grammatical point of view, many …
Do you need to scrub the floor to remove that stubborn stain? Maybe you’ve realized they made you pay way too much for that coffee? Or perhaps someone grabbed the last taxi right under your nose? In Italian, we have one verb that perfectly captures the frustration (and action!) in all these situations: fregare. fregare …