Better Reading Italian, 2nd Edition

Better Reading

ITALIAN

Second Edition

Daniela Gobetti, Ph.D.

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Contents

Preface

How to use this book

Il bel paese

Torino A children’s poem devoted to Turin

Il Touring Club Italiano Advertising a tour of Sicily

Trieste (I) An early-twentieth-century poem about Trieste

Trieste (II) An excerpt from a recent best-seller

L’agriturismo

Vacationing at an agrotourism inn in Tuscany

Slow food

L’Arcigola Manifesto of the Slow Food Movement

Il mangiarbene

A culinary report on a restaurant in Piedmont

Il buon vino fa buon sangue Italian wine profiles

I vini di origine controllata

D.O.C. wine nomenclature

La scienza in cocina e l’arte di mangiar bene

Recipes from the 1891 classic by Pellegrino Artusi

La moda e il design

Kartell Web site of a furniture manufacturer

Tensione e compressione

The famous designer Bruno Munari

Io speriamo che me la cavo

A Neapolitan student’s essay on home life

Ville, villette, villone

An excerpt from a novel by Carlo Emilio Gadda

La moda italiana

A news report on Italian fashion at the Paris shows

Costume e società

Il male di vivere

A feature article on anorexia in laRepubblica

La moda maschile

A tongue-in-cheek article on male fashion

Il problema demografico Demographic trends in Italy

Il calcio The soccer scene in Italy

La beatificazione

The recent canonization of a Capuchin monk

La scuola

Cuore The classic children’s book from 1886

La maturità

The nationwide test for Italy’s nineteen-year-olds

La matematica in rima

Poems to help children learn math and the seasons

La gatta A story written by elementary schoolchildren

Lessico famigliare

Una città famigliare

A poem treating Turin as extended family

Lessico famigliare

Growing up in a Jewish family between the wars

Famiglia cristiana

Personal advice from a Christian magazine

Va’ dove ti porta il cuore

An old love affair revealed to a granddaughter

Sebben che siamo donne…

La Lega

A solidarity song of women workers in the Po Valley

Mamma

A popular 1940 song on the mother-son relationship

Donna in guerra

The feminist awakening of a young married woman

Le donne e la politica

An article on women’s representation in Parliament

Il femminismo

Italian feminist declarations from the 1970s

La comunicazione, la musica e i giovani

Social media, empatia ed entropia: Prima parte

Blogging on popular music

Social media, empatia ed entropia: Seconda parte

The pros and cons of social network media 241

Ottantaedintorni

A blog on Italian pop music

Navigating the Web in Italian

Instructions for downloading bonus reading material

Answer key

Preface

Better Reading Italian is intended for native English speakers who wish to improve their skill in reading Italian. Although we live in a world where English is becoming the lingua franca, foreign languages are now more accessible than ever, thanks to the Internet and furiously multiplying web sites. Learners not interested in classical literature may find it useful, or even necessary, to be able to navigate a site in a foreign language.

The first step to better reading is to read more. To encourage beginning readers to pick up this book, it has been organized into sections according to eight areas of interest—travel within Italy, cuisine, fashion, customs and society, education, the family, feminism, and social media, as well as one online (Italian attitudes toward America)— with the idea that at least one of these areas might interest them already, and that after exploring that area, interest in another will follow naturally. It is also true that reading better encourages us to read more.

All of the reading selections in this book are original. Students of Italian may find easier, carefully prepared pieces in their grammar books, where every sentence is calibrated to the student’s level of proficiency. But learning to read a foreign language means learning how to understand texts that are aimed at native speakers and therefore take for granted references, context, and levels of understanding that are mysterious to foreigners. Sooner or later, readers must confront this problem if they want to understand texts that express the culture of a foreign country. The first selection is a children’s poem that is grammatically very simple, as simple as the vocabulary used. But its references—to a city and its landmarks and to a children’s book, Cuore—may create difficulties for a foreign learner, no matter how proficient his or her knowledge of the language may be.

Readers should be patient with themselves. A first reading may yield only partial understanding, so it is crucial to read a selection several times, at different times. A reference to gli azzurri in a newspaper headline may make sense only after visiting a web site on Italian soccer. (Azzurri is the nickname for the national soccer team.) A reference to D.O.C. wine may mean nothing to you until you see it spelled out on a bottle of fine Italian wine: Denominazione di Origine Controllata.

While this book cannot thoroughly cover all things Italian, it does attempt to give a sense of the complexity and range of Italian linguistic production and cultural attitudes. The chapter on fashion and design includes an excerpt from one of Gadda’s novels that is difficult even for native readers! It is included here to show how far the language can be pushed by a good and complex writer. The chapter on the family offers a portrait of family relations that are not exclusively focused on the stereotypical figure of an overprotective mamma.

How to use this book

One of the joys of reading is that you can read what you want, when you want, however you want.

The format of Better Reading Italian enables you to use, and benefit from, the book in different ways. One approach is to read the easiest selections in each section, writing the exercises after each one, then progress to more difficult selections. The level of difficulty of each piece is indicated. Level 1 selections are for learners who, while having a command of Italian grammar, have yet to acquire a large vocabulary and are not accustomed to long and complicated syntax. Level 2 selections present some lexical and syntactic difficulties that can be solved by a dictionary and a grammar book. Level 3 selections are for the student who wishes to extend an already proficient reading knowledge of Italian. There are two pieces beyond level 3: an excerpt from a novel by Carlo Emilio Gadda and (online) a poem by Giovanni Pascoli. These provide a sense of how the limits of the language can be pushed so that even native readers have to mobilize all their resources to understand what the writer wishes to convey.

Another approach is to select a topic that interests you, read each of the selections in order, writing the exercises after each one. If you are really interested in this topic, you will probably be able to read the most difficult selections—because you want to and because you have been developing important reading skills that make the material easier to read. Then you may choose another topic that interests you.

English words and phrases are now common in Italian. Some are indispensable, although in many cases there is no need to use English words except to flaunt one’s (often superficial) knowledge of English; why should you say the new economy instead of la nuova economia? Nevertheless, because this is the linguistic trend in Italy, Better Reading Italian provides readers with examples of the living language, not just with examples of good Italian.

Users of this book are invited to use props: dictionaries, grammar books, product labels, maps, and—above all—the Internet. Several Italian web sites have English versions, and several offer English translations of the original site.

The exercises that follow the reading selections are designed to develop reading skills.

• Making sense of the selection. Extensive comprehension questions follow each reading selection. Some of these questions can be answered after a quick reading to determine general purpose and content; others may require you to scan the selection for detailed information. In many cases, you can make educated guesses about the meaning of words by their use in the context of the sentence, the paragraph, or the entire reading. By the time you are able to answer all the questions yourself (there are no answers at the back of the book!), you will have acquired a full comprehension of the reading.

• Vocabulary. Nouns relevant to a particular topic are listed with the appropriate article, since it is the article, not the ending of the noun, that tells you its gender. Adjectives are listed in their basic form, which is usually masculine singular. You should attempt to learn nouns with their articles and verbs with the preposition(s) most commonly used to link them to their objects.

    Many Italian words have cognates in English—words that are similar in form and meaning. We instinctively translate these Italian words because they look like English words: fondazione immediately conjures up foundation. But some of these words will fool you; they look like English words but have very different meanings. These words are called falsi amici, false friends. For example, attuale means contemporary or up-to-date in Italian, not actual or real. Italian words that are similar in both form and meaning to English words are called true cognates in this book and are set in bold type in vocabulary lists.

• Grammar points. Clear, concise grammar explanations are provided to help make sense of a specific selection. Related exercises reinforce your grasp of these grammar points and will inevitably be of use in further reading.

• Fill in the blanks. These exercises ask you to complete a sentence, often with a word or expression that can be found in the selection or a vocabulary list. This encourages you to use a word in more than one context, thereby learning the semantic field that it covers. Unless otherwise noted, write-on lines for answers indicate that the answers can be found in the Answer key at the end of the book.

• Idiomatic expressions and proverbs. These lists help you recognize and learn the meaning of forms that are lost in translation.

Buona lettura!

Il bel paese

It seems appropriate to begin a book on how to read Italian with a quotation from Dante. The phrase il bel paese comes from Canto XXXIII of Dante’s Inferno: Il bel paese là dove ‘l sì sona, "the beautiful country where the sì sounds (as opposed to other ways of saying yes," such as the northern French oui and the southern French oc). This set phrase has been so successful that in 1906 a manufacturer of dairy products, Galbani, introduced a cheese with that very name.

In recent decades the description of Italy as il bel paese has been popularized by Panorama, a magazine that for many years offered a weekly political cartoon by Carlo Tullio Altan called Il bel paese. The tone was unmistakably ironic, as if to say, Beautiful country all right, but not to be completely trusted and not to be taken entirely seriously.

The label stuck. And that is how il bel paese is used here: affectionately and ironically, as the title of a group of reading selections devoted to Italy as a land of tourism. (As many people visit Italy each year as live there: about 60 million!)

Tourism is inseparable from tourist guidebooks, which aim to give visitors all the right reasons for going somewhere. The skies are always blue, the sun is always shining, the monuments are always imposing, and the food is always fine, if not downright extraordinary. These guides, however, may not convey a complete, or even truthful, picture of the country. This section juxtaposes five reading selections about four Italian places: a children’s poem about Turin, a web site advertisement for a package tour of Sicily, a poem about Trieste, an excerpt from a recent best-seller about Trieste, and an advertisement for a country inn in Tuscany.

A children’s poem stands at the beginning because learning a foreign language requires, in part, regressing to the early years of life. As language-learning adults, we need to accept the idea that our minds shrink to the vocabulary, syntactic structure, and context of children. This, of course, is not to take anything away from the intensity and preciseness of feelings, images, and ideas that children and good children’s writers can attain.

LEVEL 1

Torino

Gianni Rodari (1920–1980) worked all his life on pedagogical and educational issues. He wrote several books of poetry and prose for children, which have been translated into several languages, including English, Russian, and Japanese. Rodari compared his work to that of a toy maker, for he believed that children learn best when they are at play. In 1970 he won the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award for children’s literature.

The poem that follows is part of a collection of prose and poetry entitled Filastrocche per tutto l’anno. It is devoted to Turin, the capital of Piedmont, which is the region where Rodari came from, even though he spent much of his life in Milan. In the poem Rodari refers to characters from a well-known children’s book, Cuore, which remains important even though it was published over a hundred years ago.

Torino

Sotto i portici di Torino

ho incontrato uno scolaretto.

Garrone? Nobis? Il muratorino

che della lepre, rifà il musetto?

Come le pagine vecchie e care

del vecchio Cuore, sempre belle,

le vecchie strade diritte e chiare

si somigliano come sorelle.

Torino, Torino

il Po e il Valentino

le colline incantate

per farci le passeggiate

di fine settimana,

e la Mole Antonelliana

in mezzo alle cartoline

illustrate.

Gianni Rodari, Torino, Filastrocche per tutto l’anno, Editori Riuniti, 1986

ESERCIZI

BACKGROUND NOTES

This poem, though simple, contains references to places and things that children must be acquainted with if they are to understand it. The children’s book Cuore was written by Edmondo De Amicis and published in 1886. It has a role in Italian literature and imagination not unlike that of Huckleberry Finn in the United States. An excerpt from Cuore (page 133) may help you understand the characters Rodari mentions. Po is the Po River, which originates in the mountains west of Turin and empties into the Adriatic Sea. Valentino is Turin’s equivalent of Hyde Park, a royal park given to London’s residents in the seventeenth century. La Mole Antonelliana is Turin’s most recognizable building, like the Tour Eiffel in Paris.

MAKING SENSE OF THE POEM

A Answer the following questions. You can mark your progress in understanding the poem by using the check boxes provided.

What do the first stanzas of the poem focus on—people or places?

What does the word Cuore refer to—the organ of the body or something else?

What links the characters mentioned in the first stanza to the book Cuore?

How do pages and streets resemble one another—in a physical way or in the impression they make on the reader?

What are the streets of Turin like? What kind of city do you visualize? One that has narrow streets and is snail shaped, like a medieval town? Or a more modern city?

What do the last two stanzas focus on?

Is Turin close to the sea? To the mountains? To the hills?

What does la Mole Antonelliana evoke? Strolls? Postcards? Paintings?

What is your general impression of the city? If you know anything else about Turin, does what you know agree or contrast with Rodari’s depiction?

BUILDING VOCABULARY WITH SUFFIXES

Italian is rich in diminutives, augmentatives, and pejoratives. These are words formed by adding suffixes to nouns and adjectives to express nuances, often of size or of an affectionate or disparaging nature.

The most common diminutive suffixes in Italian, -ino/-ina and -etto/-etta, indicate smallness.

The most common augmentative suffix in Italian, -one, indicates largeness, sometimes with a negative connotation. When -one is added to a feminine noun, the resulting noun is masculine.

Some Italian words can take both -one and -ona suffixes (for example, la villa, il villone, la villona).

The most common pejorative suffixes in Italian, -astrol-astra and -accio/ -accia, convey a negative meaning.

Care should be taken when creating words with suffixes. Since you might be creating words that would not be used by a native speaker, it would be wise to use only formations that you have heard or seen in print.

B Classify the following words as diminutive, augmentative, or pejorative, then write the noun from which each is derived.

Now form diminutives by adding the appropriate suffixes to the following words. Some words can be modified in more than one way, for instance, by adding either -ino/-ina or -etto/-etta to form the diminutive.

IDIOMATIC EXPRESSIONS

From the Italian word muso (nose, face) comes the expression fare il muso (mettere su il muso), which means to pout.

The phrase rifà il musetto appears in line 4