When I first moved to Italy back in 2008, one of the biggest culture shocks I experienced was the general apathy towards Halloween. I originally come from Canada, a country that like the USA enjoys celebrating Halloween as much as Christmas and Easter, so it was a surprise to see October 31st come and go …
When I first started learning Italian over a decade ago, much of my studying was based on the traditional pen-and-paper format of writing down vocabulary and grammar in a notebook and trying to memorise everything by rote. Although this method worked better than simply twiddling my thumbs waiting for fluency to happen, it wasn’t without …
Food is an incredibly important part of Italian culture, so it is little wonder that so many of their most popular sayings and idioms contain words related to food and eating! In this article, I’ve come up with a list of ten of the best Italian sayings featuring food that I’ve encountered since I started …
Gorgeous is a popular adjective used to describe someone who is beautiful or something that is attractive or pleasant. It can also be used as a term of endearment to flatter someone. There isn’t a direct translation for gorgeous in Italian, but there are lots of words that express more or less the same thing, …
In the biographical romantic drama Eat Pray Love, unfulfilled business woman Elizabeth Gilbert – played by Julia Roberts – leaves behind her marriage, house and high-flying job in America to embark on a year-long spiritual journey of self-discovery in Italy, India and Indonesia. Her first stop is Rome where she spends four month stint learning …
When I was a kid back in Canada, my friends and I used to have competitions in class to see who could roll their Rs the longest, much to our teachers’ chagrin. Now, I don’t have many claims to fame from my school years, but I can proudly say that when it came to tongue …