In English this Italian idiom translates as “chickens always come home to roost” or “your sins will find you out”. The literal translation “all knots come to the comb”! In Italian un nodo is a knot and un pettine is a comb. Just learned this proverb today and I think it’s a good one! New vocabulary for me as well!
Cycling around the Mura storiche, the historic medieval walls of the city of Lucca in Tuscany, is absolutely the most fun way to view the city for all the family – €18 rental charge per hour for the small size family bike. Kids sit in front pretending to steer the bike 🙂
Walking from the town of Vinci in Tuscany on the path to Anchiano, following the “Strada Verde”, through olive groves where the trees are still flowering, and the land is on the cusp of summer, you are rewarded with this view . There is an abundance of wildflowers and a redstart is singing from his perch on the top of a post. Through the olive trees we can hear the purring of a turtle dove. At our destination in Anchiano, 3 km from Vinci, is the ‘Casa natale’ of Leonardo Da Vinci, his family home, now a museum. This walk is the perfect antidote after touring around cities with overheated kids!!
Ahhhh how much I miss pizza. This ‘Deliciously Ella’ gluten -free recipe is tasty with a cripsy quinoa base, though labour-intensive to make the base without a food-processor. With a simple topping of tomato puree, mushrooms and cherry tomatoes the end result was a thumbs up – Pollici in su!
The other day I learned the Italian word for tray, il vassoio, and had one of those moments of incredulity when I looked at the dictionary. Vassoio? Tray? Really? naah, that can’t be right. Vassoio does not seem like it would mean tray. I could believe it meant vase, or some other kind of vessel, that would be fine with me; For example annaffiatoio means watering can, and I am happy with that. However, a translation of a word is not something you can argue with, it just is ! This internal struggle made me smile as I could have ended up thinking I’m the only one to have issues like this with vocabulary, had I not recently read a book by Rachel Cusk, called The Last Supper : A summer in Italy.
Towards the beginning of the book she talks about her approach to learning Italian, and how she likes learning vocabulary:
“It is in the area of vocabulary that I feel my resources can be most securely invested. An identifiable object has a kind of neutrality, like Switzerland : It is a place that seems to offer the possibility of agreement. I have no difficulty with an armchair being una poltrona or a rug il tappeto : indeed I almost prefer calling a mirror uno specchio , for it seems to suit it better.”
This is all fine until she reaches the word scarpa
“But sometimes I cannot escape the feeling that the word in my hand is counterfeit money, for there are other words that have no ring of truth about them at all. They are false somehow, I can’t believe they’ll work. How could a scarpa for instance be the same thing as a shoe? If i went into a shop and asked for a pair of scarpe, I would surely be handed a brace of woodland fowl, or two fish with particularly bony spines..”
I think this is my problem too in this case, for some reason I am unwilling to relinquish the reliable tray-ness of my native word.. although I have no problem with accepting the translation for the majority of other Italian words I have so far come across.
I would love to hear if anyone else has experienced a similar problem with learning a particular word, an Italian word, or in fact a word in any other language, especially Latin 😉
I thought it might be nice to share my discovery, my favourite new phrase that I learned yesterday in my Italian lesson – at least for any cat-lovers out there who might like to talk about their cat purring. My teacher recommended that I should listen to a canzone carina “La Gatta” by Gino Paoli, after I had confessed to her that I didn’t know that la gatta existed in Italian, and had thought cats were always referred to as il gatto, whether male or female. She shared the lyrics with me ( il testo ), and the song is about a cat who has a macchia nera sul muso, just like my cat 🙂
The song continues like this:
Se la chitarra suonava, la gatta faceva le fusa, ed una stellina scendeva vicina, vicina, poi mi sorrideva e se ne tornava su.
When I translated faceva le fusa, I realised that listening to the guitar made the cat purr…. so my new phrase of the day is Il mio gatto fa le fusa (my cat purrs) because my cat is a boy cat!
After having spent a while this week studying pronominal verbs – farcela, andarsene, cavarsela, avercela – I also discovered that hidden in this song is another such pronominal verb – tornarsene – which was a new one for me. The little star smiled and returned back up.
My particular favourite of the pronominal verbs I learned about is farcela ( to manage to do something) which is great to use in conversation at a moment of triumph – Ce l’ho fatta! I did it! I managed to do it! Remember it next time you want to celebrate something good that you have achieved in Italian 🙂 🙂
He weighs five tons, he lives in the Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze and he’s – probably – the most famous statue in the world. Yep you guessed it Michelangelo’s David was the first Italian statue I read about in the news this week. Since 2014 there have been fears for David after a series of tiny fractures were discovered in his legs. The concerns about his caviglie fragili mean that in the event of an earthquake (terremoto) he could be at risk of toppling over. Architects and government ministers were reportedly in discussion recently about the possibility of building an “anti-seismic museum” where some of Italy’s greatest art works could live safely including David with his muscoli di marmo (muscles of marble)
The second statue in my newspaper was Nettuno, the sea god Neptune, inhabitant of Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore, who was recently caught up in a scandal on Facebook, being accused of violating their rules of decency. His picture posted on the page Storie, curiosita‘ e scorci di Bologna (Stories, Curiosities and Views of Bologna) has since been reinstated after they admitted an error. I like the word scorcio which was a new word for me – although the quick translation was given as’view’, more precisely it translates as a ‘glimpse’ or ‘partial view’ (visuale ristretta di una vista piu’ ampia) or also a ‘perspective’.
On a personal note, the most exciting thing about both these statues is that I hope to visit both of them and see them with my very own eyes during our trip to Italy in May!!! 😊 I have been obsessed with Bologna for at least three years,despite never having been there, so it is about time to finally change that….
Buon Anno 2017 a tutti!!!
