Dance and Travel

This year I had the pleasure to assist to one of the most important event that opens the spring in Spain: Las Fallas de Valencia . In this article I am going to investigate which was the original meaning and see how it has transformed all over the centuries . Sacred and Secular Origins: The mixture between sacred and secular it has always been strong in Catholic countries. However, there are different hypothesis about the origin of Las Fallas festival. O ne suggests that the Fallas started in the Middle Ages , when artisans used to burn broken artifacts and pieces of wood that they saved during the winter in order to celebrate the Spring Equinox. Another one is that Valencian carpenters used some planks of wood called  parots  to hang their candles on during the winter. When spring came, they were no longer necessary, so they were burned. Over time, and with the intervention of the Church, the date of the burning of these  parots  was made to coincide with the celebr

As a Portuguese learner I had soon to face the problem of learning new vocabularies. Among them it is impossible not making reference to one of the most important: “Saudade”. If you have been in Portugal or in Brazil at least once in your life, you should have heard about this feeling. Yes, because I am talking about “a feeling” which is untranslatable in other languages and that is a key word to understand the culture and the two countries as a whole. As a consequence, in this article I am going to explain the etymology of the term first, then I will try to give a definition. Finally I will propose possible translations of the word. The etymology of Saudade is controversial, however the prevailing theory affirms that it derives from the Latin Solitate which means “solitude”; from that term derives the modern for of Soledad” in Spanish and Solid ã o in Portuguese. Nevertheless, the form Saudade involves also the influences of Saudaç ã o, greeting, and Saude, health, salvat

When I approach first the Portuguese language as Italian speaker, I was thinking to a single unitary block. I already expected some dialectal influences, in particular in Brazil, due to the fact that is composed of many federal states. However I could never expect that Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese could differ in grammatical, syntactic and lexical forms. We are not talking about British English and American English, we are talking about almost two different languages and cultures. Of course also for the people who do not know the syntactical and lexical differences, it seems to be evident the musicality of the Brazilian variant, due to the different pronunciations of the words. Pronunciations: Ex. Sauda d e, felicida d e, aon d e, d epois (“d” sound for Portuguese, while “gi” sound for Brasilian variant) Ex. Noi t e, gen t e, sen t ir  (“t” sound for Portuguese, while “tch” sound for Brazilian Portuguese) Besides, I recollect 10 different expression and

It was in 2009 the first time that heard about Portugal and it is in my heart since then . I was almost 19 and it was my first time living  far from my family. You might know that it is not so common for Italians to go to live far from their parents so early. The most of us love living at home almost till 30, someone also more than it. Anyway, I went to Genova to study and I lived in a student residence. There I met one of the most important person of my life. She was Polish and she had 7 years more than me. At that time she had already traveled a lot. For her everything started with an erasmus in 2005 in Portugal. We spent our evening talking, in English of course, and  learning, a least I have lerned a lot from her. It was a new language, a new culture, a new perspective . My first big discovery: there was someone living outside my country which could understand me much better than people from my own country . She was the first one who thalk me about Portugal and Lisbon. I reme