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.