Sanremo 2010

Hope you are all watching the Sanremo Festival 2010!  This is the annual festival of Italian song, held each year at Sanremo (in Liguria).  Italy pretty much shuts down while the festival is happening, with everyone being glued to their TV sets.

In years past, there has been some great performances at the Sanremo festival.  This one by Adriano Celentano is one of my favorites.  This entry, Canzone, took second place at Sanremo 1968:



Sanremo 2010 started off with 15 artists in the competition, which lasts for 5 nights.  (One of the artists is the winner of X-factor, which is a show similar to "American Idol".)   At the end of each night a couple of artists are eliminated until the "final showdown". Some of the artists are new, some are veteran singers...and I also believe there is a separate category called "Sanremo nuovo generazione" which are the up-and-coming young singers.

Among the artists at Sanremo 2010 was Toto Cutugno (renowned for his 1982 hit L'italiano), who sung Aeroplani.  A great song, but unfortunately it didn't make the cut after the first night of the festival.



If you have the RAI International channel on cable, then you can watch the festival as it happens. If not, then you can go to the website www.sanremo.rai.it to view the individual performances after each night's competition is completed.  (Due to copyright laws, live streaming  of the Festival outside Italy is not permitted.)

More about Sanremo to come later....for now I'm going to listen to some musica italiana!  Buon ascolto!

Buona festa di San Valentino a tutti!

Buona festa di San Valentino a tutti gli innamorati ... sopratutto questi che parlano italiano!
(Happy Valentine's Day to all those in love...especially those who speak Italian!)

I leave you with Massimo Ranieri's rendition of Rose Rosse ... a truly wonderful and touching song.



Chorus

Forse in amore le rose non s'usano piu
Ma questi fiori sapranno parlarti di me
Rose rosse per te, ho comprato stasera
E il tuo cuore lo sa cosa voglio da te!

Perhaps (when you're) in love flowers are out of fashion
But these flowers will know how to talk to you about me
Red roses for you, I bought (them) last night
And your heart knows what I want from you!

Now there are a couple of interesting grammar points here.

1. non s'usano piu = non si usano piu'
   
   1. The si merges w/ usano for euphony's sake, we'll discuss that in a later post
   2. This is an idiomatic expression of usare, which means "they are out of fashion, they have no more use"
2. sapranno parlarti di me
   
   1. When sapere is used with an infinitive, it means "to know how to do something".
   2. Also remember we can add a direct object pronoun right onto an infinitive, so sapranno parlarti di me = they will know how to talk to you about me.
   3. Finally, sapranno is the 3rd person future tense of sapere.
3. E il tuo cuore lo sa
   
   1. Unlike in English, the definite article (in this case, il) is used when making the possessive, even though it's not translated. So even though il tuo cuore literally translates to "the your heart", you don't translate the "the"...it just renders as "your heart".  (The only exception to this rule is when you are talking about family members, then you usually drop the definite article: mia madre, mio zio, etc.)
   2. Whenever you know something in Italian, you know it (i.e. the direct object pronoun has to be used).  So in English we'd say, "And my heart knows" but in Italian it strictly translates to E il tuo cuore lo sa ("And my heart knows it"). You can of course omit the "it" part when rendering into English.

You can read the lyrics from angolotesti.it as well.  (Angolo = corner and testi = lyrics or text, so angolotesti = lyrics corner.)

You can also look at this karaoke version of Rose Rosse from Youtube.  I find that looking at Karaoke videos is a really good way to learn Italian song lyrics and pick up new vocabulary along the way.

The fare causativo (or how to get someone to do what you want)

One of my favorite songs is La Notte by Salvatore Adamo:



In the song you will hear the following line:

La notte, tu mi fai impazzire.
(Night, you make me go crazy.)

This is a wonderful example of the fare causativo in Italian.  This is how you express the idea of

1. Making someone (or something) do an action. 
2. Making someone (or something) do an action to someone else (or something else) 

This is a very common construction, and you will see this all over the place, in both written and spoken Italian.

The fare causativo construction consists of 3 or 4 elements:

1. indirect object  +  
2. conjugated form of fare  +  
3. an infinitive  +
4. an optional direct object

1) The indirect object is always the person or thing that is going to do the action.  (This may be a indirect object pronoun (i.e. mi, ti, gli/le, ci, vi, gli) or disjunctive prepositional phrase (i.e. a me, a te, etc.)

Thus in our example from the song, because "me" is the thing that is going to do the action "go crazy", we need to list it as an indirect object pronoun...thus mi fai impazzire.

2) The conjugated form of fare determines the person (or thing) that is the prime instigator of the action.  So in the case of our example text, "Night, you make me go crazy"...the instigator of "making me go crazy" is "you" (referring to "Night").  Therefore, the conjugated form of fare has to be fai.

And don't forget, the conjugated form of fare can be in any tense.  So you could also have any of the following:

• mi hai fatto impazzire  
  (passato prossimo: You made me go crazy)
• mi facevi impazzire   
  (imperfetto: You used to make me go crazy)
• mi avevi fatto impazzire   
  (trapassato: You had made me go crazy)
• mi facesti impazzire   
  (passato remoto: you made me go crazy (a looooong time ago))
• mi faccia impazzire   
  (pres. subjunctive: you might make me go crazy) 
• mi facessi impazzire   
  (imp. subjunctive: you might have made me go crazy)
• mi faresti impazzire   
  (conditional: you would make me go crazy)
• mi avresti fatto impazzire   
  (past conditional: you would have made me go crazy)
• etc.

3) The infinitive represents the action to be done.  Thus we need to use impazzire, which means "to go mad, to go crazy".

4) The action can also take a direct object (although our example from the song does not have one).  If so, then you can just add the direct object noun or pronoun (mi, ti lo/la/Le, ci, vi, li/le).

Here are some more examples of the fare causativo.  If you wanted to say, "I make you check my tires", you can say:

A te faccio controllare le gomme.
(Literally: To you I make to check my tires.)

You could simplify this by replacing the indirect object prepositional phrase a te with the indirect object pronoun ti:

Ti faccio controllare le gomme.
(Literally: To you, I make check my tires)

and you could even use a direct object pronoun for "tires" as well.  In this case you end up with a double pronoun such as:

Te le faccio controllare.
(Literally: To you, I make to check them)

Double pronoun lesson is for another day. :-)

P.S.  As a bonus, check out Salvatore Adamo's La Nuit, which is the French-language version of the song La Notte.  Fantastico!