In the past, we have already talked about the differences between the two main simple pasts in Italian: imperfetto and passato prossimo. We have already seen how imperfetto simply changes endings while passato prossimo is made up of the auxiliary, essere or avere ­plus the past participle. We have also talked about when to use one auxiliary and the...

Today I am going to cheat a little bit. I am not in fact going to talk about Italian words specifically, but about Italian words that became completely part of the English vocabulary. Let’s begin by saying that as all loanwords, they are not fully used properly, as the Italian grammar and meaning would require, but hey, that’s just the way it is. S...

Italian is known as a melodic and musical language all around the world: to foreign ears, Italians seem to sing what they are saying instead of speaking. Well, today I am here to tell you just how right you are, but not as you would imagine. Today, we are here to talk about how much music influenced the Italian way of speaking and expressions.  Whe...

And here we are again on our journey together around the Italian dialects and languages. This time we are going to the region called Emilia-Romagna, a region that almost crosses Italy entirely from East to West. It is the last northern region and it is known for its medieval villages and its amazing food that I am sure you have heard of, such as ra...

We have already seen the difference between the passato prossimo and imperfetto indicativo, but those are not the only two past tenses you can use in Italian on a regular basis. There is also the passato remoto, a tense that it is not really taught to people who are trying to learn Italian, or at least only at higher levels. Why? Well, the explanat...

This month, we are going to look at some Italian words that have changed meaning throughout time. In fact, I was browsing the internet and I found some very curious ones that I though you might enjoy as well. Let’s take a look!  The fist one is casino. It might seem like an English “casino” but in Italian that one actually has an accent on the fina...

In Italy we say: Marzo pazzerello, aprile con l’ombrello – March is a goofy fellow, in April you need the umbrella – so what a better topic for April than rain? This month I’m going to tell you all about Italian expressions that have to do with rain. Let’s begin!  In Italy, every month has a specific quality to it, and April is the rainy month of t...

Let’s continue our tour of all the languages and dialects of Italy. We started our journey from Val d’Aosta and last time we stopped in Veneto. Now it’s the time to move to a very interesting region especially from a linguistic point of view: Friuli-Venezia Giulia (Friuli for short).  Even if “Venezia” is part of its name, Venice is not in this reg...

People probably have been telling you how Italian is hard because of its verbs, tenses, endings, and articles. But what about prepositions? Has anyone ever told you anything about them? Well, well, well. Let me just tell you about them.  To begin with, what are prepositions? They are usually short words that precede a noun or pronoun and that expre...

New year, new section! Since just like any other language, Italian is alive, I decided that it was time to talk about its developments, its neologisms, its life! As technology progresses, new objects enter our lives and a language has to find new words for them, new adjectives, new verbs. So I decided to discuss them with you, to keep you updated,...