Goodbye Pizzo
Wednesday April 30, 2008
"Goodbye to mafia extortion" is one way to translate Addiopizzo, a grass-roots organization recently created to combat organized crime. The word pizzo refers to the protection racketeering used by the ... Read More
Italian Gets Small (Really Small)
Saturday April 26, 2008
The Italian language appears in the most unusual of places—this time, as a nearly massless elementary particle in atoms. An article in Scientific American titled: "Carbon Wonderland" relates how physicists ... Read More
Your Own Italian Language Newspaper (Redux)
Wednesday April 23, 2008
Sometimes great ideas are just slightly ahead of their time. Case in point was eDay, a Web site launched in April 2000 that allowed users to customize and print out ... Read More
Breakfast No Longer First
Wednesday April 23, 2008
On the About.com Italian Language Forums recently a native Italian pointed out that the expression "prima colazione" is considered outdated or overly formal.Back in the mid-90's, when I first studied ... Read More
Il Punto Ironico
Friday April 18, 2008
A community member in the About.com Italian Language Forums proposes a new Italian punctuation mark (segno d’interpunzione): "...in italiano c'è il punto esclamativo e il punto interrogativo, ma non c'è ... Read More
Mi Piace Dire "Pipistrella"
Wednesday April 16, 2008
Schiacciare. Butta giù! Qualsiasi. Cucchiaio. Orologio. Fazzoletto. Aspirapolvere. These are just some of the words and phrases that community members in the About.com Italian Language Forums have identified as their ... Read More
Vota!
Sunday April 13, 2008
Just in time for the Italian national elections is Manifestipolitici.it. Self-described as a: "...banca dati sul manifesto politico e sociale contemporaneo," the site is a databank of over 10,000 political ... Read More
Veltrusconi: The Two-Headed Monster
Thursday April 10, 2008
Merge the recent mayor of Rome who is a former communist and could easily by mistaken for a rumpled professor with the center-right former prime minister of Italy who used ... Read More
An Italian Would Never Say That
Wednesday April 9, 2008
With a big smile you greet your classmates in that total-immersion language course in Firenze you're taking (or friends at an art exhibit opening in Rome, or long-lost family members ... Read More
V2 Day: 25 Aprile 2008
Tuesday April 8, 2008
Mark your calendar—V2 Day is Friday, April 25, 2008, and it promises to be even larger than the original V Day.For the uninitiated, last September, comedian-cum-grass roots political activist Beppe ... Read More
Batty Italian Acronym in the News
Saturday April 5, 2008
Recently, an article in the Automotive section of The New York Times declared that: After 53 Years of Beauty Sleep, the B.A.T. Is Back. It turns out that B.A.T. is ... Read More
What I Did On My Summer Vacation (Learned Italian...And How to Make Gelato)
Wednesday April 2, 2008
It's not too early to start thinking about Italian language summer study vacations. Consider the summer language program at De Rada Italian Institute, based in San Demetrio Corone, a historic ... Read More