What do you imagine when you hear the word panini? Probably a delicious sandwich, served warm after being toasted to perfection, am I right? What you may not know is that panini is actually the plural of the Italian singular panino, which quite simply means bread roll or sandwich. Etymologically speaking, it is the diminutive …
In Italian, there are two predominant terms for watermelon, and the one you end up using the most will depend on where you live in Italy. My husband is from Turin in the north-west of Italy, and the only word he’s ever used for watermelon is anguria (feminine, plural: angurie). This term is also dominant …
A staple food of Italian cooking is rice or riso in Italian. In particular, it is used in the popular dish risotto which can be made with any variety of short-grain rice including Aroborio, Carnaroli, Vialone, Nano, and Baldo. Unlike other kinds of rice, the short-grain kind has a higher starch content and absorbs less …
One of the key ingredients in most Italian dishes is aglio, the word for garlic in Italian. A bulb of garlic in Italian is testa d’aglio, which literally translates as a “head of garlic”, and each bulb is made up of a number of spicchi d’aglio (garlic cloves). Pensi che io abbia messo troppo aglio …
Scarpetta in Italian is the diminutive of scarpa, the word for shoe or boot. It refers to any small shoe including a child’s shoe, a small and elegant shoe that ladies wear, or a flat sports shoe made of light and flexible material such as canvas or rubber. The idiomatic expression fare la scarpetta (lit: …
A delicious tropical fruit that Italians love eating in the summertime is ananas, the Italian word for pineapple. It is currently the third most important tropical fruit in world production. Whereas the English word pineapple was applied to the fruit because of its resemblance to a pine cone, much of mainland Europe adopted the word …