Fantastic J Cole

Hello again

I really enjoyed England vs Sweden yesterday evening and for the moment I think it was the best match of the World Cup, wasn’t it? Joe Cole struck a fantastic goal for England hitting a magical lob (I’ve just learnt the word “lob” reading BBC news… in Italian is “pallonetto”) from a great distance! I’ve also read that Owen will be ruled out because of his knee injury. I’m very sad for him and for all of us who won’t be able to see such a big footballer in the next matches.

I would like to thank Ms Wicaksono for her comments and her suggestions. About the rain in Italian we use the adjective ‘battente’ to mean ‘heavy’ and so ‘heavy rain’ is ‘pioggia battente’. We use a diminutive of the Italian word ‘pioggia’ (rain) to say ‘drizzle’ and so ‘pioggia’ becomes ‘pioggerella’ (a little rain). I didn’t know the phrase ‘it’s raining cats and dogs’ and I think it sounds really funny. To say ‘good luck’ in Italy we often use the phrase ‘in bocca al lupo’ which means ‘in the mouth of the wolf’. If someone tells you that you will answer, instead of thanks, ‘crepi il lupo’ which means ‘the wolf must die’!

I love lasagne! My mother always cooks them for me when I come back from Turin and I’m really happy because I adore this food. However my favourite one is pizza and I like ‘margherita’ as the best; in fact instead of pizzas with too many ingredients I prefer the original margherita from Naples with only mozzarella, tomato, and a leaf of basil. I’ve never eaten chicken satay but I’m very curious about it because I like very much kebab (it’s my favourite meal when I’m alone in Turin).

When I visited London I was able to go in a lot of fantastic and famous places. Some of them were The National Gallery, Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Camden Town Markets, the Speaker’s Corner in Hide Park. I was very lucky because during my holiday Buckingham Palace was open to public and so I was also able to visit it. However the thing I particularly liked in London was not a specific place but the atmosphere you can breathe just walking around the city. Different people, different cultures, different religions cohabit in London which is the city of tolerance, love and peace. That is why I would live there… and I hope I’ll do in my future!

Now I would like to answer Cindy about Barry Lyndon… What you said is the truth! Kubrick didn’t use artificial light for Barry Lyndon, and so the internal scenes were lighted only using candles. To be able to photograph these sequences he used particular lenses which had been developed by NASA for the Apollo program. The lenses were the Zeiss 50 mm and 36.5 mm. About Visconti and Pasolini… I adore their films and I’ll be pleased to talk about them in next posts!

Thank you all the readers for your comments… you’re very kind! I hope we’ll continue to improve our English together during next days.

See you soon!

Bye

Antonio

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