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The Florentine
Linda Falcone, an English-speaker and an Italian-thinker, is the author of three books with The Florentine Press, and others with Jane Fortune for the Advancing Women Artists Foundation. She has lived, taught and written in Italy for almost 2 decades.
‘You almost never write about women,’ a woman friend told me not long ago. ‘Most of your articles talk about men.’ I had not been tallying up ...
You'll see them at the hairdressers, at the spa and by the beach. You'll find them toted like fuzzy Pokemon hand-bags that whine and yap. Most often, their fur matches their owners' hair. We could even start a debate: discuss the identity of Italian dogs and decide
Word gifts are all around. Sometimes they come as swooning song lyrics or arrive in the mail with greeting card sweetness. And sometimes, yes, sometimes, a lovely pair of parole will crop up in the most unlikely of places and rock a girl's linguistic presumptions straight to the core. &
The national inclination to downplay one's resources is matched only by the widespread ability to savor a challenge. Anyone who lives in Italy inevitably has a bit of investigatore privato running through his or her veins, for no other country proves a better setting if you're intent
Admittedly, most English-language learners are concerned with the nuts and bolts of it. Until the 1990s, students of English in Italy based their language skills on a single unarguable certainty: the pen is on the table. Whose pen it was, what it was doing there and whether or not
Those who have lived a significant portion of their lives abroad will admit it: most opinions are not personal-they are national. In Italy, they hold these truths to be self-evident: Sardinia should be seen in May and September. Pane con la mortadella is a snack that saves lives.
Some articles are born faster than others. The one you're reading now would not reveal itself until I'd cleaned every room in the house. In fact, it held out until I'd emptied all the heavy clothes from the closet and loaded them up into boxes labeled inverno.
In the 1960s, Italians stood beneath il boom economico as if it were a firecracker exploding over the Arno on the night of San Giovanni. Families started cultivating city living rather than soil, digging their heels into la modernità with the zeal of a lady selling soap on TV.
English-speakers, with their obedient, pocket-dwelling language, are fascinated by it-the way Italians surround their speech with gesture, shaping the air between two people as if it were sand on which to build castles. Hands and arms often wave in the forefront, but those who want to know
At first glance, Striscia la notizia is fluff TV at its finest. Two ballerine who have yet to master the basics of ballo carry out their dance routines on top of the newscasters' table while the Gabibbo, a red-suited relative of Barney the Dinosaur, does his best to appear
Once upon a time, long, long ago, Italians hated the telephone and feared it. A greenish-gray contraption the color of the cold war, il telefono sat in the hallway of everyone's homes, banished from access to the ‘real' rooms. Way back then, a blundering state-owned company
Lo and behold, that day has arrived. There you are minding your own expat business, when it finally happens and Italy becomes un discorso cellulare-an issue of the cells. It takes seven years, biologically speaking, for our cells to be completely renewed while the little buggers build us a
Some people talk in language class, others speak at the hairdresser. I fall into the first category: at the beauty salon I only listen. Parrucchiere, the Italian word for hairdresser literally means ‘wig maker' but a more accurate term would be consigliere because these people give nothing but counsel
Annual unpaid taxes in Italy equal 275 billion euro a year, which roughly amounts to the size of Portugal's entire economy. But if you want to know what Italians are doing with the money they scrape off the top of the government's cream pie, take a weekend shuttle
Christmas trees come with roots in Italy, and mine, by some miracle of the Evergreen, is still alive on the balcony and sprouting new buds despite the merciless winds of winter. This discovery of unexpected spring in February is my fatto bello della settimana and I go out there often.
If I had an analyst, she would probably tell me that my very first visit to what Italians call il commercialista has something to do with turning 37 and the need to become a more responsible citizen. Luckily, I don't have an analyst. People living in Italy seldom do
On New Year's, Italians will tell you that fertility and marital devotion are a consequence of eating the ruby seeds of a pomegranate. And if your money belt is too short for buckling both sides of the month together, fear not. Lentils, like tiny coins made soft from boiling,
The friendly rules of party etiquette forbid the rabid discussion of religion and politics, whose fanning flags risk turning the centerpiece candle into a blazing hazard. We could even stretch ...
‘Florentine women are trained to be indecipherable-what you don’t know, they say, will ultimately charm you,’ Paola told us. Broad grins are a sign of weakness and easy-to-read ladies from ...
