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As usual, the signs start out as language lessons and wander off into film, shepherding, road paving, machinery, public transportation, hospital logistics, and dogs that look sort of like Beagles. Let's begin.
Fagioli alla Bud Spencer. Ricetta originale.
"Bud Spencer-style beans. Original recipe."
The grammar isn't the interesting part here. Alla Bud Spencer simply means roughly "Bud Spencer style." The more interesting question for an English-speaking visitor looking at a can of beans in Carrefour might be: Who is Bud Spencer?
Bud Spencer was the screen name of Carlo Pedersoli, an Italian swimmer who represented Italy at the 1952 and 1956 Olympics before becoming an actor. In 1967, when he was asked to adopt an American-sounding name for an Italian western, he combined Budweiser, his favorite beer, with the surname of actor Spencer Tracy. His co-star Mario Girotti similarly became Terence Hill, and Bud Spencer and Terence Hill went on to become a hugely successful screen duo, especially in comic westerns and action films.
And the beans aren't random. Beans cooked in a pan became strongly associated with the Bud Spencer-Terence Hill films, particularly the Trinità movies, enough that Italian food writing has referred to an entire comic "fagioli-western" tradition.
So, there is quite a lot packed into a €3.35 can sitting between the mushrooms and lentils. The label assumes you already know the joke.
Il cane da raduno raduna e sposta il bestiame seguendo le indicazioni dell'allevatore.
"The herding dog gathers and moves the livestock, following the farmer's instructions."
We liked this sentence because of the repetition: il cane da raduno raduna...
The noun raduno comes from radunare, meaning to gather or bring together. We usually encounter raduno referring to a gathering of people: un raduno degli Alpini, un raduno automobilistico, a rally, meet, or gathering.
Here, though, cane da raduno is literally a "gathering dog," what we would normally call a herding dog in English. Then comes raduna, the third-person singular of radunare: the gathering dog gathers. The Pasturs sign itself contrasts this job with that of il cane da protezione, whose task is to defend livestock against predators and other threats.
Then we get sposta, from spostare, "to move," and seguendo, "following": raduna e sposta il bestiame seguendo le indicazioni dell'allevatore = gathers and moves the livestock according to the farmer's instructions.
The distinction between the dogs took on a little more meaning after our recent long hike up the Vò Valley to Rifugio Tagliaferri, where we came across a herd of roughly 1,000 Pecora Gigante Bergamasca and spoke with the shepherd tending them. With that many sheep, radunare e spostare stops sounding like a vocabulary exercise and starts sounding like quite a job description.
"Bud Spencer-style beans. Original recipe."
The grammar isn't the interesting part here. Alla Bud Spencer simply means roughly "Bud Spencer style." The more interesting question for an English-speaking visitor looking at a can of beans in Carrefour might be: Who is Bud Spencer?
Bud Spencer was the screen name of Carlo Pedersoli, an Italian swimmer who represented Italy at the 1952 and 1956 Olympics before becoming an actor. In 1967, when he was asked to adopt an American-sounding name for an Italian western, he combined Budweiser, his favorite beer, with the surname of actor Spencer Tracy. His co-star Mario Girotti similarly became Terence Hill, and Bud Spencer and Terence Hill went on to become a hugely successful screen duo, especially in comic westerns and action films.
And the beans aren't random. Beans cooked in a pan became strongly associated with the Bud Spencer-Terence Hill films, particularly the Trinità movies, enough that Italian food writing has referred to an entire comic "fagioli-western" tradition.
So, there is quite a lot packed into a €3.35 can sitting between the mushrooms and lentils. The label assumes you already know the joke.
"The herding dog gathers and moves the livestock, following the farmer's instructions."
We liked this sentence because of the repetition: il cane da raduno raduna...
The noun raduno comes from radunare, meaning to gather or bring together. We usually encounter raduno referring to a gathering of people: un raduno degli Alpini, un raduno automobilistico, a rally, meet, or gathering.
Here, though, cane da raduno is literally a "gathering dog," what we would normally call a herding dog in English. Then comes raduna, the third-person singular of radunare: the gathering dog gathers. The Pasturs sign itself contrasts this job with that of il cane da protezione, whose task is to defend livestock against predators and other threats.
Then we get sposta, from spostare, "to move," and seguendo, "following": raduna e sposta il bestiame seguendo le indicazioni dell'allevatore = gathers and moves the livestock according to the farmer's instructions.
The distinction between the dogs took on a little more meaning after our recent long hike up the Vò Valley to Rifugio Tagliaferri, where we came across a herd of roughly 1,000 Pecora Gigante Bergamasca and spoke with the shepherd tending them. With that many sheep, radunare e spostare stops sounding like a vocabulary exercise and starts sounding like quite a job description.
Attenzione, sobbalzo di corsia.
A natural translation here would be something like “Caution: uneven lane surface” or “Caution: sudden change in lane level”.
We saw these signs while walking in Città Alta as a road was being resurfaced. Sobbalzo was new to us.
The noun sobbalzo comes from the verb sobbalzare. Treccani defines sobbalzare as making small repeated jumps or jolts, particularly when talking about a vehicle traveling over an uneven road. With a person, it can also mean to jump or start suddenly from surprise or fear. Sobbalzo is the resulting jolt or sudden movement.
So:
A natural translation here would be something like “Caution: uneven lane surface” or “Caution: sudden change in lane level”.
We saw these signs while walking in Città Alta as a road was being resurfaced. Sobbalzo was new to us.
The noun sobbalzo comes from the verb sobbalzare. Treccani defines sobbalzare as making small repeated jumps or jolts, particularly when talking about a vehicle traveling over an uneven road. With a person, it can also mean to jump or start suddenly from surprise or fear. Sobbalzo is the resulting jolt or sudden movement.
So:
- La macchina sobbalza sulla strada sconnessa.
The car jolts along the uneven road. - Ho sobbalzato quando ho sentito il rumore.
I jumped when I heard the noise.
Organo in movimento.
Moving part / moving machinery. We saw these two signs in Milan. Our first reaction was to organo in movimento, which translated word for word gives us organ in motion. This sounds considerably more medical than mechanical.
But organo has a technical meaning in Italian. In machinery, an organo can be a component or functional part of a machine. Italian safety literature routinely uses expressions such as organi in movimento, organi ruotanti, and organi di trasmissione for moving, rotating, and transmission components.
The other question we had was whether in movimento means that the thing is moving right now, or that it could move.
Grammatically, it simply means "in motion." There is no "might" or future sense built into the phrase. But as a safety warning, organo in movimento is better understood as a category of hazard: moving part. The component does not have to be moving at the instant you read the sign, any more than an English "Caution: Moving Parts" label becomes false when a machine is switched off. The warning is that this thing moves when the system operates, so don't assume it will remain where it is
That is particularly useful information when the thing in question looks, at first glance, rather like part of the floor.
OCCHIO!
Watch out! / Careful!
We saw this AMT sign during our weekend in Genoa, a city where getting around can involve buses, elevators, funiculars, and a fair amount of vertical thinking.
Occhio literally means "eye," but by itself as an exclamation, Occhio! means Watch out!, Be careful!, or Pay attention! Treccani specifically lists it as an interjection used to call someone's attention to a danger.
You can also say:
- Occhio alla macchina!
Watch out for the car! - Occhio a dove metti i piedi.
Watch where you step.
So OCCHIO! is simultaneously "watch out" and an actual eye, reinforced by the camera lens sitting inside the eye in the image. It is one of those cases where the Italian is considerably more compact than the English explanation required to understand why it works.
A causa delle diverse modalità di trasporto la consegna potrebbe non rispettare la successione del numero di coda.
A fairly literal translation is: “Because of the different methods of transport, delivery may not follow the sequence of the queue numbers.” A more useful translation in context would be: “Because the medications arrive by different transport methods, they may not be dispensed in queue-number order.”
We encountered this sentence while waiting at the Farmacia delle dimissioni at Papa Giovanni XXIII hospital in Bergamo. This is not simply a pharmacy conveniently located near the exit. After a patient is discharged from the hospital with a newly prescribed drug therapy that must continue at home, the Farmacia delle dimissioni can provide the drugs for the first treatment cycle, enough to bridge the period until care passes back to the patient's general practitioner. It also dispenses certain hospital and chronic-therapy medications.
So dimissioni here means hospital discharge, and Farmacia delle dimissioni is reasonably translated as discharge pharmacy.
The sign becomes easier once it is pulled apart:
- a causa delle = because of / due to
- diverse modalità di trasporto = different transport methods
- la consegna = the delivery or, here, dispensing of the medication
- potrebbe non rispettare = might not follow
- la successione = the sequence/order
- del numero di coda = of the queue number
There is even more machinery behind that sentence than we realized. Papa Giovanni uses an automated pharmacy warehouse and a pneumatic transport system to move some medication kits from the warehouse to the Farmacia delle dimissioni.
In other words, if you are number 46 and they call 48 first, this does not necessarily mean the Italian queue has finally abandoned all pretense of numerical order. Number 48's medicine may simply have arrived before yours.
We were already in the intellectually receptive state produced by sitting around watching a hospital queue display, so naturally we photographed the explanation.
Avvistata l'ultima volta nella chiesa di Sant'Alessandro di via Pignolo.
Last seen in the church of Sant'Alessandro on Via Pignolo.
This was a notice for a missing black-and-white cat. What was that cat doing in the church?
The useful verb here is avvistare, from vista. It means to sight or spot something, traditionally with the sense of beginning to see or recognize something from a distance. It turns up particularly in contexts such as sighting a ship, aircraft, person, or something being searched for.
The full sentence could be: È stata avvistata l'ultima volta... She was last seen... On the notice, è stata disappears and we are left with the compressed: Avvistata l'ultima volta...
Also note that it is avvistata, feminine, because the missing animal is una gatta.
English normally reduces the whole idea to the very ordinary "last seen." Italian's avvistata feels closer to last spotted or last sighted, which seems particularly appropriate when everyone in the neighborhood has temporarily become part of a cat-search operation.
This was a notice for a missing black-and-white cat. What was that cat doing in the church?
The useful verb here is avvistare, from vista. It means to sight or spot something, traditionally with the sense of beginning to see or recognize something from a distance. It turns up particularly in contexts such as sighting a ship, aircraft, person, or something being searched for.
The full sentence could be: È stata avvistata l'ultima volta... She was last seen... On the notice, è stata disappears and we are left with the compressed: Avvistata l'ultima volta...
Also note that it is avvistata, feminine, because the missing animal is una gatta.
English normally reduces the whole idea to the very ordinary "last seen." Italian's avvistata feels closer to last spotted or last sighted, which seems particularly appropriate when everyone in the neighborhood has temporarily become part of a cat-search operation.
Light a candle in your local church for this cat.
Beagle-like female, small-to-medium size.
This was another missing-animal notice, this time for Bella (who prefers shopping at LIDL over churches?).
The interesting word is simil. It isn't the adjective simile with the final e casually dropped. Simil- is a combining form derived from simile and is used to indicate something with characteristics resembling something else. Treccani gives examples such as similpelle, imitation or synthetic leather.
So simil Beagle means Beagle-like, resembling a Beagle, or, more loosely in English, Beagle type.
We might be tempted to translate it as "Beagle mix," but that says slightly more than the Italian does. Simil Beagle describes appearance or type; it doesn't necessarily make a claim about Bella's actual parentage.
It's useful shorthand for a lost-dog sign. If you don't know exactly what she is, but she looks enough like a Beagle that "Beagle" will help someone recognize her, simil Beagle gets the job done.
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