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 …
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 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 …
Today, as I was listening to the classic Lucio Battisti hit Ancora Tu on the radio, I was reminded of myself at 23 years old, strolling under the portici (arcades) of Via Roma in Torino, iPod in hand, doggedly trying to memorise the lyrics, and in particular, our word of the day which appears in …
A noun that describes someone who loves sleeping, or habitually sleeps in a lot, especially in the morning, is dormiglione (masculine, plural dormiglioni) or dormigliona (feminine, plural dormiglione) in Italian. The best translations are sleepyhead and late riser. Today’s word is the combination of the verb dormire (to sleep) and the suffix -one which is …