Piano, piano

If you’ve read my blog on ‘bello’ and ‘bruto’ you may be forgiven for thinking that those are my least favourite Italian words. Wrong! Piano, piano is my most hated phrase. Oh, how I loathe and detest it.

Piano, piano – to those who don’t know Italian – generally means ‘Take it steady’, ‘Slowly does it’, ‘A bit at a time’ (you get the picture?). It is mostly used when an Italian is lost for words (and, yes, that does happen). So, why do I hate it so much?

Well, my main reason is that it is superficial and just ‘gloss’. Not wishing to harp on a theme, there are some things that my disability makes very difficult for me – standing being one of them. As soon as I get to my feet I have literally one minute to get to another chair or face the most vicious back pain. So, there I am, face screwed up in agony, frantically trying to get to the nearest chair and all my Italian supporters can say is ‘piano, piano’. I can’t take it steady – I’ve got to get to a chair as fast as I can.

I tell them that after five years of studying Italian – having a private tutor, doing every single exercise in an old-fashioned textbook and four years of living in Italy – I can hardly string a sentence together. What do I get back? Piano, bloody, piano. If I ain’t sussed it after all that, I’m not going to. Piano nothing.

I hate being trivialised and this phrase epitomises that action.

Bello and Bruto

You might be forgiven for thinking that ‘Bello’ and ‘Bruto’ were two protagonists in some Renaissance operatic but you’d be wrong. This unlikely pairing are to be encountered every time you ask an Italian to make a decision. Nothing is ever ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, things don’t ‘work’ or ‘don’t work’ and your taste is not ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Everything is ‘Bello’ or ‘Bruto’.

For example, we’re just having a thermostat control panel fitted in our front room. The electrician, a most knowledgeable chap who knows my views nearly as well as I do, immediately starts off with telling us that one type of panel is ‘Bruto’ and the other is ‘piu bello’. It’s a control panel – it works or it doesn’t work. I don’t consider it a thing of beauty. If I had my choice, the wall would be devoid of switches etc but then we’d have no lights or heating and I would not like that.

The same thing happened when we put in a slotted drain next to the swimming pool. One type was ‘bruto’. Why it was ‘bruto’ goodness knows but the general consensus was that it was.

Ditto again with the layout of the garden which we have deliberately chosen to aid my disability. The location of the paths etc aren’t intended to be ‘beautiful’, they are practical and allow me to have the access that the ‘bello’ option would deny.

So, everything gets labelled ‘Bello’ or ‘bruto’ – from the tiniest screw to the new tractor. To the non-Italian eye, there is absolutely no logic to it whatsoever and, even to those who were born and bred locally, some still ‘get it wrong’ and label ‘bruto’ for ‘bello’ or vice versa.