My Favorite Italian Words
by Ed M Wood
(from: http://www.babbel.com/magazine/ )
I’ve written about my favorite German words and my favorite Spanish words, two languages with
which I am fairly well acquainted. My experience of Italian is nothing like as rich as of German or
Spanish - I have never lived in the country, I have never walked in their shoes. But I have visited
on a fair number of occasions, and each time I’ve scrabbled words together from a hodgepodge of
dog-eared phrasebooks and chance encounters.
My relative unfamiliarity is not the only obstacle to the compilation of a list of favorite words there are simply so many wonderful ones in Italian. I know, I know, there are in every language.
But Italian just rolls off the tongue, winks at your cochlea and tonotopically tickles your inner ear.
A colleague of mine recently commented, “Italian even sounds stunning when you’re saying
something unpleasant”.
So I’m spoilt for choice, but hopefully not by it. Here goes.
1. Allora (conjunction) - Then, so
When you start learning a language, there are always some words that jump out from otherwise
incomprehensible sentences. It gives you the hope that one day, maybe, the rest of the sentence
will become equally as easy to process. So it is with the word allora, which your Italian
counterpart will draw out before you prior to plunging into a scintillating sentence. It’s one of
those slightly fuzzy words whose translation all rather depends upon the context in which it is
used, but it can most typically be translated as “so” or “then”.
Alloooora, andiamo avanti con questa storia?
2. Rocambolesco (adj.) - Fantastic, adventurous, nailnail
biting
The language nerds and linguists among you will no doubt point to the French origin of
rocambolesco.. Rocambole is a fictional character developed by the French writer Pierre Alexis
Ponson du Terrail in the 19th century. The French word rocambolesque then evolved from this
character’s predilection for swashbuckling adventure, and the Italian word denotes a heady fusion
of the fantastical, the adventurous, the daring,
dar
the nail-biting
biting and the downright incredible. This
is the romanticised image I had in my head as I boarded the plane to Italy as an 18 year old
readied for a solo romp around western Europe.
3. Chiacchierone/a (noun) - Chatterbox
I had planned a trip around Italy, Austria, Switzerland and southern Germany to eradicate any
remaining savings hoarded during a year of work and travel. In Venice, I met an old school friend
of Italian descent and proceeded to mull around the canals trying to take stock of this surreal
theme park of a city while she prattled on about the gossip from her first year at university. And
then she paused
d in a moment of self-reflection;
self
“Ah I’m such a whatchamacallit.”
“Well, yes, perhaps, but that rather depends on what you mean by whatchamacallit”, I responded.
“I’m a proper … chiacchierona. I never shut up! How do you say that in English again?”
A chiacchierona,, we quickly established, is a chatterbox, a prattler, a tattler, a loose-lipped
loose
blabbermouth. It’s also a fabulous word with bundles of chit-chattering
chit
cha--cha-cha sounds and a
shovel full of imagery. And what’s more, all of the derivatives are equally
equally as beguiling; Chiacchiera
or chiacchierata (chit-chat)
chat) and the verb chiacchierare (to chatter). If you take your chiacchiera
one step toward the more malicious, you’ll stumble across another lexical gem; pettegolezzo, or
gossip.
4. Sfizio (noun) - Whim
I’m not a big shopper. My shopping trips are executed with military precision and discipline;
discip
tunnel
vision in aisles of distraction. And yet as I boarded the train to be whisked away from Venice
Metro to Ferrara, I found myself weighed down by an assortment of carnevale paraphernalia, the
utter uselessness of which became increasingly manifest
manifest with every meter gained between Venice
and this otherwise thrifty traveller. I now attribute the momentary lapse in providence to lo
sfizio del vacanziere - the whim of the holidaymaker.
Sfizio:: the tongue sizzles and fizzles with the two opening consonants,
consonants, achieving an even higher
frequency vibration on the third. It sounds great, and I like the meaning, too. As much as I would
have liked to see myself as a vero viaggiatore - a true traveller - it’s ever so hard to convince
oneself of this with a plastic
ic carnival mask in hand. Not rocambolesco.. Not at all.
5. Struggimento (noun) - Misery
From Ferrara
rara I bundled into Bologna, trusty guidebook in hand, expecting a bustling student town.
One of the drawbacks of guidebooks is that they sometimes cause one to abandon common sense
and curiosity. University was out, the sky was overcast, and the conference
conference brigade was in town. I
flicked through to the accommodation section and was alarmed to see one measly hostel. I
phoned. Full. I trotted from one budget hotel to another. Full. All full. Awful. I turned to tourist
information for the first time in my life.
life
“Non sapevi che c’è una conferenza in città? Gli hotel sono tutti pieni.”
Scheiße! Eighteen years young with nowhere to go.The trains had stopped running. I suddenly felt
my age - my own personal struggimento as a consequence of the capitulation of my illusion of
assured independence.
An Italian friend of mine recently expressed frustration at the lack of a satisfying translation
for struggimento and its wobbly mix
m of gut-churning
churning misery and yearning. I don’t think I’ve fully
grasped the concept. Then again she suggested that the English simply don’t know how to suffer,
protected by a stiff upper lip on our island of emotional detachment, so perhaps I never will, and
perhaps I’ll be better off for it.
6. Dondolare (verb) - To rock, swing, wobble
From the struggimento of my night in Bologna, where I ended up sleeping in an extraordinarily
dirty flat belonging to a friend of the lady at the tourist information, I arrived in Florence. I’d
learned from my mistakes and booked ahead, selecting a fine looking
looking establishment to compensate
myself for the squalor of the day previous. I entered into a broad, ornate common room
decorated with travellers’ bodies enjoying a post lunch inertia the Italians refer to as abbiocco.
Pride of place in this room was reserved
reserved for an old rocking chair which was currently occupied by
a bedraggled Australian intent on impressing the receptionist with his few accented words of
Italian. Beside him was a sign which read, “Non dondolare troppo sulla sedia a dondolo, dondolone!”
Dondolare means to swing or to rock. And, apparently, a dondolone is literally someone who rocks
and wobbles, and figuratively is a loafer or idler.. A word can’t get much more onomatopoeic than
this, although sussurrare (to whisper) certainly comes close.
7. Mozzafiato (adj.) - Breathtaking, riveting
I arrived in Rome having ticked off Pisa and Siena en route. I had visited these cities with
ruthless efficiency, dividing my time and attention equally between photo taking, sightseeing,
guidebook reading and pizza eating. And now I’d had enough. We often find ourselves led by
guidebooks and an insatiable need to confirm that we have seen in person what we
w have seen a
million times on television; a city’s tired celebrities.
In Rome I sought to get irretrievably lost among the city’s alleys and avenues. I enjoyed the
inevitability of a reward for my misorientation, whether it were a fountain, a church or a well
haunted café. The merits of this approach were emphasised following a visit to St. Peter’s. My
father’s words resonated in my head.
“The Pieta is the most extraordinary piece of rock you will ever see.”
No doubt it would have been had I caught a moment’s
moment’s glimpse among the irritable swarm of flashy
photographers. I retreated and escorted myself to a small church near the Colosseum where
Michelangelo’s majestic Moses perched patiently, waiting to share a moment of solace away from
the collective confinement
ent of St. Peter’s. It is this visione mozzafiato,, standing alone before this
godlike creation of man, that will always welcome me to this particular memory lane.
Mozzare means to cut or chop off, and fiato is your breath. Mozzafiato therefore follows the
collocative pattern of its closest English equivalent, “breathtaking”, but the act of amputating
one’s air feels more sudden and extreme than the simple act of taking, and somehow more
appropriate for a country possessed of such “breath-chopping”
“breath
beauty.
8. Dietrologia (noun) - The belief in hidden, underlying
realities
And so we come to the final word in my list, which, I must admit, I didn’t learn on my Italian
skidaddle. I learned this word but weeks ago whilst reading Matt Rendall’s sublime biography of
the Italian cyclist Marco Pantani. The story of Pantani’s life is embedded within a rich portrayal
of Italian history and culture, and Rendall delineates the very Italian notion of dietrologia, the
“conviction that hidden dimensions underlie surface reality” and the “madcap search” for them, as
fundamental to understanding Pantani’s rollercoaster ride of a life.
Closing Words
I learned my first Italian words out of nutritional necessity as my stomach rumbled, and jumbled
words came tumbling urgently from my very English mouth. The arrival of the dish you ordered is
an affirmation of the utility of your new words, your new language, and a further mini-motivation
mini
to continue learning. These mini--motivations
motivations are fundamental to the language learning process, and
continue to fuel my interest in languages in general and Italian in particular.
Words like dondolare and sfizio offer an enjoyable euphony, whilst mozzafiato and struggimento
provide a deeper, more nuanced angle on their English equivalents, to which I am always destined
to refer back. Dietrologia sheds light on a particularly Italian worldview. When we weave these
levels together we form a map by which a culture can be navigated. It is my belief that this map
will deliver you to a destination infinitely more rewarding than any guidebook, and it is this belief
that continues to drive me to learn languages.
From Rome I headed back north to Milan and then across the border to Switzerland, where I had
to oil the rusty gears of my school French, but that’s another story for another time, and another
collection of favorite words.