Italian-Brazilian Rafael Tronquini, communication manager at Europass Italian Language School, talks to The Florentine about what’s new at the popular institution in Florence, including reduced class sizes, online offerings and ...
The #paroledasalvare campaign is attracting word lovers to Florence’s piazza Santa Croce, the latest stop on Bologna-based dictionary publisher Zanichelli’s nationwide tour. The aim is to save more than 3,000 ...
Italian, like all languages do for their respective cultures, conveys an essence of what it means to be Italian that cannot be fully understood using other languages.
Accents have never been my forte. When I was 13, a haughtier, more New Yorker version of me, charged with the occasional cawfee and wata slip-ups, took off for summer ...
There’s a pocket-sized enoteca in NYC’s “the Village” that serves Italian wines by the glass: its name is Gottino. In Pontassieve, my hometown that regularly sleeps, miniscule pizzeria Da Sandrino ...
If you’ve ever eaten in San Niccolò, likely it was a hearty Florentine affair among amici at the Osteria Antica Mescita. On the table a fiasco flowing with rough-around-the-edges red ...
It is not just the Italian language that has made me crazy: some responsibility has to go to Florence.
To start an article entitled ‘Per Firenze’ by conjuring a chat on a Roman porch is just a step up from heresy in Florence, so true-blue fiorentini may well be ...
There is something about the phrase “I live in Italy” that makes amicable strangers act like you’ve just announced you’ve won the jackpot. After their excitement dies down, the “inevitable” ...
Francesco is a filmmaker and he and I have a good working relationship, unless you count the fact that he is the parade and I am the rain. A peaceable ...
That third person singular, conditional tense sarebbe did not fill me with confidence.
I spent February 14 in a banquet hall in Venice’s campo San Samuele, across from a palace whose facade Casanova once climbed to reunite with the neighborhood’s most ravishing Rapunzel. ...
At the age of 22, Italian citizenship in hand, I decided to apply for my very first concorso statale. If you don’t know how to feel about this first sentence, ...
My friend Karla’s miniscule flat on via dei Bardi needs crowd control even when no one but she and her husband are standing in it. Still, New Year’s Eve at ...
Giancarlo, the affable man with whom I team teach, recently took off for Japan on what he described as a ‘mother-in-law mission’. ‘Japanese women like Italian men,’ he said to justify the absence. I believe his time off is better justified by the fact
Director of The Florentine Marco Badiani speaks great English, but, when it comes to idiomatic phrases, his choice is to be the king of the ‘detto non detto,’ offering creative ...
Giancarlo, the affable man with whom I team teach, recently took off for Japan on what he described as a ‘mother-in-law mission’. ‘Japanese women like Italian men,’ he said ...
It was a bad day at The Florentine. We were up against last-minute translation deadlines, the guys were producing animations for some key client up north and, lo and behold, ...
Jeremy is my American scholar-friend who dresses like an Englishman and happily attends Florentine cultural lectures like the kind I conjure. Then, as a member of the educated audience, ...
My friend Cornelia has been pining over Pinco Pallino for several years now. Cornelia is a pseudonym and Pinco Pallino is the fictional name for Italy’s run-of-the-mill Joe Shmoe. The fact that she didn’t react to me calling him that means she’