Posts from December 2008

Acqua Alta a Venezia

Posted by Serena 1 Comment
Dec 2 2008

On Monday this week acqua alta (high water) reached 156 cm above its normal level in Venezia, creating a lot of damage and discomfort to the city and its population. The whole of the lagoon was flooded and the passerelle (gangways), which are normally set up to allow people to walk on in the event of a flood, were floating. Shops and ground floor businesses were invaded by the murky water, and rubbish and other objects were washed away, while gondole and vaporetti (ferries) could not travel. There are some photos of the flood on this page of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

This is not a very romantic image of Venezia, but it is reality, a reality that its citizens have to live with due to the unique nature of Venezia, which is built on a series of islands just above sea level. Because of its shape the Adriatic Sea, on the coast of which the city is located, is subject to greater sea tides than the rest of the Mediterranean. If we add to this the heavy rains of the past few days and the strong winds that drive the seawater inside the lagoon and prevent it from returning to the sea again, we get a very dramatic situation. There are also other factors, both natural and man-made, that contribute to the problem of the acqua alta, such as the fact that since 1897 (the year of the first official measurement) Venezia has sunk by 23 cm, and that the industrial area of Porto Marghera was built by reclaiming land from the sea. Originally Marghera was an area of very low islands, which allowed the water to flood over them, working like an expansion tank for the lagoon.

Theoretically these floods could be prevented by a pneumatic barrier system called MOSE (Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico), designed to isolate the lagoon from the sea in the event of a combination of an exceptionally high tide and extreme weather. However the works, which were begun in 2003 with a planned completion date of 2012, have been criticized by environmentalists because of the ecological impact that they are having on the wildlife of the lagoon. For more information about this project see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSE_Project

La Pronuncia, part 1.

Posted by Serena 2 Comments
Dec 1 2008

Italian, as I’m sure you will have discovered by now, is a ‘challenging’ and often confusing language, and for every rule there seem to be twenty-five exceptions.

The good news however is that one set of rules is consistent, and those are the rules governing la pronuncia (pronunciation). Once you have mastered these fixed rules your life as a student of Italian will become much easier.

 

Firstly the vowels:

a is pronounced like a as in apple: e.g. banca

e sounds like e in met: e.g. fetta

i is similar to ea as in easy: e.g. vino

o sounds like the o in toffee: e.g. opera

u is pronounced oo as in cool: e.g. uno

 

So far so good, now for the consonants:

C is one of the consonants that most often confuses English speakers. Take the title of this blog for example, La Pronuncia. In the English word pronunciation the ci is pronounced like the word sea, in Italian however ci sounds like chee as in cheese.

Likewise c followed by e uses a soft ch sound as in chat.

So the rule is c followed by i or e = soft ch sound: e.g. cinque, centro, circo, cena.

C followed by a,o,u, or a consonant, on the other hand, makes a hard sound like c as in cat: e.g. casa, cotto, classico, cucina.

It’s easy to see how this can lead to confusion for an English speaker. Take the Italian word China for example. In Italian China is not a country but a popular alcoholic drink and it is pronounced keena. The country China is in fact written Cina and pronounced cheena, and a Chinese person is una persona cinese.

 

The consonant G follows a similar rule, taking on a soft sound when followed by e or i like the g in ginger. Some examples of this are Genova, giraffa and agenzia.

G uses a hard sound like g in gap when followed by a, o or u, and most consonants: e.g. grazie, albergo, pagare, gamba.

 

H, well this one is easy because it’s silent, we don’t pronounce it! : e.g. hotel pronounced otel, hai pronounced ai, and so on.

 

Now I’ll give you a bit of time to digest these rules. Try finding some Italian text and applying what you have learnt to unfamiliar words. More to follow in part two…………………

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