Longing or Desire

In Italian, if you want someone or something badly, you can say: "desiderare" or "bramare".

"Bramare" is an interesting verb, though. A sort of magic and obscure desire for someone or something.

In English, apart from "to desire", you can always say "to long for".

And "to long for" gives you the exact idea of the sweet and neverlasting pain of desiring someone or something.

Manage or Run?

In Italian, you would say: "Io dirigo una società".

It means that you manage a company: you are sitting in your office and give orders to the workers by phone.

But in English you would say "I run a company". This means that you are sweating to make it work, you are running together with your partners and workers to make things right.

A slightly different point of view, but with a whole world of meanings underneath.

Marbles in Marmo

I was just thinking about the slight difference in the meaning of marble and the corrispondent translation in Italian marmo.

Marmo makes you think of the hardness and coldness of the surface (maybe because we use to say "hard like the marmo" (duro come il marmo) and "cold as the marmo" (freddo come il marmo). Marmo is also the most common material used for tombstones. These are very common expressions in day-to-day language.

Marble makes you think instead of the shining surface of the marble, maybe because in English "marbles" are also the shining little glass balls which young boys use to play with ("biglie").

Fascinating, isn't it?

Human Nature

They says that it's common for women to try to change their men's nature.
But what do men try instead to do with their women's nature? To make them domestic and indulgent?

John Donne

No man is an island, entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;

I'll pencil it!

I have always thought that one of the best thing about speaking English rather than Italian, is that English has shorter words, sentences, periods.

I.e. I'll pencil it on my diary (7 words, in total 21 letters)

In Italian?
--- Lo scriverò con il lapis sulla mia agenda (8 words, in total 35 letters!!!).

And I'm not sure that the Italian sentence conveys the wide range of meaning of the English one.

Last but not least, I do love the stress given to "I", the self-person that English always show.

I'll pencil it (the stress is strongly based on the subject, the object comes later).

Lo scriverò (the object of the sentence comes first and the subject is not stressed).

My Grand-grand-mother Gina

My Grand-grand-mother Gina had been a baby sitter, a "balia" as they would say, for the Prince Chigi's son and daughter.
She left her three young children with her husband and her older daughter, Clelia (my grand-mother), and lived in Rome for the greatest part of the year.
Tuscan young women were said to be great and strong women, good for raising children.

Prince Chigi's son and daughter one day came and visited my grand-grand-mother Gina, when I was a baby. She was very old.
I remember only two shadows and long legs walking and the excitement in the neighborohood that two famous princes would came in our house.