Il Viaggio Verso L'Italia

Learning Italian, Phrase by Simple Phrase

September 28, 2017


Buonanotte e sogni d'oro!

Buonanotte = good night, very similar to Spanish buenas noches

e = and

sogni = dreams (s. sogno, dream)

d' = of

oro = gold, exactly the same as Spanish

Good night and sweet dreams! Literally translated into "dreams of gold," sogni d'oro is a good way of saying sleep well. It's a little funny that I no longer remember exactly how I learned this phrase, as I recall it from back in my grad school days, when, honestly, none of us slept very much at all.

Now is a good time for a little backstory. In grad school, I worked in a lab with an Italian adviser. Like bursts of espresso, in filtered a steady stream of Italian visiting scholars. Since all of us worked in the same office for at least 8 hours a day, every day, I ended up becoming good friends with most of them.

In another of my favorite examples of Italian contradiction, my adviser told me not to learn Italian, as he wanted me to speak English with the rest of his students. When he came into the lab, though, without fail, he would start off in English, then several sentences in, drift off into Italian. Since Italian is just similar enough to Spanish, I would get distracted trying to understand it. Now that I've graduated, though, I can actively practice...!