I once hosted my mother visiting Rome from England. We’d been standing on the platform for quite some time at Stazione Termini, waiting for the train to Naples.
After a further ten minutes delay my mother commented, ‘But look, we’re on the wrong platform. No wonder the train’s not here. This platform is for the train going to Binario.’ (which of course means ‘platform’ in Italian). On another occasion, with rather less excuse for such a linguistic mix-up, my having lived in Italy for four years with ample time to practice the language, I was trying to arrange a meeting with a student.
‘Let’s meet at Bargiallo,’ she said at the other end of my mobile phone. ‘But which bus do I catch?’ I enquired, assuming Bargiallo to be some suburb that I had not yet visited, one of the Castelli Romani perhaps. ‘No, Bar Giallo,’ she repeated three or four times. ‘It’s a few corridors away.’ Slowly in my mind the two words separated themselves to mean, embarrassingly late, the Yellow Bar in the place where we both work.
Thank goodness for the consoling proverb, ‘Sbagliando, si impara’ (One learns from one’s mistakes).
To help stave off such misunderstandings let’s take a look at some Italian place names as they reappear in English. Who knows how many missed trains, failed appointments and fruitless waits might be spared as a result?
If, for instance, you have booked into a hotel in Leghorn, look for the sign to Livorno. More obviously Venice in Italian reads ‘Venezia’, Florence ‘Firenze’, Genoa ‘Genova’, ‘Toscana’ is Tuscany or, in post-colonial English, ‘Chiantishire’.
Getting lost in translation, particularly in busy airports, is more likely, though, when we come to Monaco – which could equally mean Munich, Germany or Monaco on the Cote d’Azur.
Finding the right establishment
Talking of which, particularly delicate is the word ‘Casino’. Put an accent on the final ‘o’, and ‘Casinò’ is a gambling establishment, as owned by a senior member of Italy’s ex-royal family. Remove the accent and the same establishment becomes a house of ill repute.
Phonetically it is a small but important distinction, a slip of the pen or stress pattern having the potential for provoking a full-blown scandal. The word also features in the everyday expression ‘Fare casino’, meaning ‘to make a noise or mess of something.’
Whatever, it should on no account be confused with Cassino, a small hill town near Frosinone famous for its abbey and the Second World War battle.
More innocent are the possible confusions between ‘libreria’,a bookshop and ‘biblioteca’, a library. ‘Il Duomo’, that wonderful feature of every self-respecting Italian city, does not actually mean ‘dome’, as I had long imagined, but ‘cathedral’. The word derives from the Latin ‘domus’, a house or dwelling, the dome or ‘cupola’ being far from a ‘sine qua non’.
In going to the art ‘gallery’, beware lest you end up down some tunnel, the other meaning of ‘galleria’. The originally Greek ‘pinacoteca’ – picture store – might be a better bet. Then remember that in a flourishing republic, ‘palazzi’ are not the prerogative of royalty. Even the humblest tenant can refer quite rightly to inhabiting, if not owning one, or at least a ‘palazzino’ as it becomes in its diminutive form, maybe with inbuilt ‘cantina’, this a cellar and not a canteen for which the word is ‘una mensa’. Similarly ‘un camper’ is a mobile home, not a person, ‘un camping’ a place not an activity, as is – in another ‘anglicismo’ – ‘un parking’.
Then, during your ‘permanenza’ or stay in ‘un villaggio’, as many holiday camps are called, that Russian-sounding ‘boongalov’ is an Italian variant of our originally Hindi ‘bungalow.’ The phonetic change is some- times accompanied by the building’s design: The ‘boongalov’ where a friend of mine stayed proved to be round rather than rectangular, and shrunk to about the size of a diving bell, one porthole in place of windows.
Troubles with travel
The workings of the ‘F.S.’ or State Railways can also be something of a mystery. That ‘espresso’ on the departure board can, in fact, be anything but. As an official at Termini explained to me, ‘It travels mostly at night and is definitely not fast, although quicker than the day and night ‘treno diretto’ which stops at every station.’ She then went on to explain how, if speed was what I wanted, I had better take the ‘Intercity.’ Or faster still, there is the Eurostar, stopping off only at major cities and leaning aerodynamically round curves, earning it the nickname of ‘Pendolino’. Third and fastest of all is the controversial TAV, or ‘treno ad alta velocità’.
A splendid beast of high-tech engineering it rockets horizontally along two routes only, Roma-Napoli and Milano-Torino. When changing train, bear in mind that ‘coincidenza’ can also mean ‘connection’, not just a happy coincidence.
To return to proper nouns, Villa Adriano, on the way to Tivoli, does not, as a watcher of one of Sky’s never-ending football channels might suppose, belong to the Brazilian/Inter-Milan centre forward – although, were he to be transferred to Rome or Lazio, he could probably afford to buy it. That signpost on Via Tiburtina refers to the Villa of Hadrian, the Roman emperor who died in York.
Then, south of Naples, there is the internationally famous “Muori”. “Muori? Never heard of it,” might be a reasonable response. Except here is the origin of the common English (and Italian) expression ‘See Naples and Die’. Or ‘Vedi Napoli e Muori’.
Not that travellers to Italy need get too discouraged by such Babel. They can console themselves that Italians, once outside Italy, are beset by parallel confusions. Think of the pitfalls between eye and untrained ear of, say, Slough, Loughborough or Llanelli. So our Brooklyn becomes their Broccolino.
There are so many opportunities, in short, of getting lost in translation – or, on a more positive note, of discovering how, via English atlas or Italian ‘atlante’, the world is more varied than we may have imagined it when we first set out.
