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Proverbs are around us in everyday life, so ingrained that we don’t even notice when we say them. Proverbs have been created to teach, educate and inspire and they are a great way to better understand culture.

This is why I have decided to gather 10 very wise Italian proverbs and show you the corresponding English one. Sometimes they are similar, other times very different, for sure reading them will enrich your day.

10 Italian proverbs to learn

Here are some very commonly used Italian proverbs if you incorporate them in your speaking, you will enhance your fluency and express yourself even better.

Chi tardi arriva, male allogia.

In English you can say The early bird gets the worm. Better to arrive early to get the best spot or best choice, this is the literal meaning.

A mali estremi, estremi rimedi.

In English you can say Desperate times call for…

After yesterday’s visit to the underground dungeons of Hell, today’s paintings try to show the reward after life for those who follow the way of the righteous: Paradise.

Paradise is a concept rather more peculiar to Christianity, and although there are pre-Christian equivalents in earlier and different European traditions, such as Arcadia and the Elysian Fields (which gave their name to the Champs-Élysées in Paris), Paradise is quite distinct. From the earliest modern European paintings, there was confusion between the Paradise of the afterlife, and the Garden of Eden from which Adam and Eve were cast out. In this article, I will concentrate on the former, as the direct equivalent of Dante’s Paradise.

Francesco Botticini (1446–1498), Assumption of the Virgin (c 1475-76), tempera on wood, 228.6 x 377.2 cm, The National Gallery, London. Wikimedia Commons.

Paradise commonly occurs in cameo views in paintings of events such as the Assumption of…

‘Anything that’s in your character at twenty-one,’ says a businessman in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night (1934), ‘is usually there to stay.’ By the age of 30, most people’s ‘character has set like plaster, and will never soften again’, wrote the psychologist William James in 1890. The exact timing varies, but it’s an old idea: there arrives a moment in life when we become essentially fixed, psychically unmalleable.

Anything that’s in your character at twenty-one is usually there to stay.

The psychologist Erik Homburger Erikson, a Jew born in Germany, would develop a more expansive view of things. In 1927, when he was 25 years old, a spell as a wandering art tutor landed him in Vienna – home and hotbed of psychoanalysis. Erikson made the acquaintance of the Freuds, and the discovery of the talking cure ‘opened a life’s work’ for him. Soon after Erikson completed…

liebe

und lebe

erfahre

und spüre

handle

und schlafe

träume

und entfalte

leuchte

und verblasse

vom leben gezeichnet

dein eigenes bild

© Jo Wolf 2019