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Buondì.

A short one today, as here in Bologna we’re all sick. There’s a nasty, wheezy, chesty thing going around, which causes a booming, dry cough, along with general exhaustion. Not to say that we’re not already worn out from caring for an energetic and easily-bored young animal. But right now the vibe is  ‘even more knackered than usual’.

So anyway, buoni sconto.

‘Buono’ – besides being the masculine form of the Italian adjective for ‘good’ – is also a noun, and in that case means, basically, ‘voucher’ or ‘coupon’, as in what you might once have snipped out from a newspaper so as to save 50 cents on detergent.

‘Sconto’, pronounced ‘sk’ as in ‘school’, means ‘discount’, a great word to memorise if you’re planning to visit Italy and are the bargain-hunting type.

Which reminds me, back in the day when our Italian school in Bologna was also an English school in Bologna, it was noticeable that the parents of Chinese kids would always ask for a ‘sconto’ when signing their kids up for extra English. It was evidently a cultural thing. Italians rarely did, Chinese-Italians always did.

And if they can do it, well so can you! No harm in asking, right? SCONTO??

Talking of cultural differences, yes, Italy is in Europe, but no, this isn’t France. Here, you’re not obliged to tip.

My Italian wife never does. I let the young sikh guy who delivers takeout pizzas keep the change occasionally, but only because it’s raining and because it makes me feel rich.

None of us leave tips in bars or restaurants. Non si fa.

I get (from reading U.S. newspapers in my library app) that in the U.S.A. tipping is ‘de rigueur’. You have to pay for the servers’ smiles. In Italy, except in tourist hotspots, not.

Dai (Go on!), break the habit of a lifetime and don’t tip! Perhaps you’ll more easily pass as a local.

N.b. Don’t bother asking for a ‘sconto’ in a bar or restaurant, unless there was a real issue – a bit of glass in your meal, or something, in which case you totally should.

But you can definitely try it in, say, a car repair shop. When you’re presented with the usual, inflated bill, look sufficiently shocked, taken aback, and disappointed. A (small) discount might spontaneously be offered. And if not, then: SCONTO?

So anyway, buoni sconto, the two words together basically meaning ‘coupon codes’. The word ‘codice’ IS used with ‘buono’, but to refer more to a specific ID number, for example on each, unique Amazon voucher.

We use coupon codes quite a lot in our businesses: for each quarterly promotion in our online lessons store, to encourage new students to give our Italian school a try, and so on.

Typically you get the ‘buono sconto’ (coupon code) emailed to you when you sign up to a mailing list. Use it when you buy something to save £££ or €€€, depending on the product or service. Unsubscribing from the mailing lists should be one-click, so what’s to lose?

Which brings me to the point.

Yesterday, someone I’d not heard of, from a country far, far away, joined the ebooks store mailing list ( https://easyreaders.org/mailing-list/ ), received his 33% ‘buono sconto’, and used it to buy four ebooks at a saving of approximately $20, which isn’t bad.

If you need Italian materials to read/listen to you could do the same ( https://easyreaders.org/mailing-list/ ).

But be aware (your country needs wares) that the generous 33% ‘buono sconto’ is ONE USE PER PERSON ONLY.

So you might want to save your 33% coupon code for when you’re ready to order multiple titles (i.e. not immediately, when you don’t know us, our products, or how to use them.)

And if you already used the 33% ‘buono sconto’ at some point in the past???

Beh, we have literally hundreds of Italian ebooks, at twelve different half-levels, from beginner to advanced (browse the catalog page to see them all and download FREE SAMPLE CHAPTERS), so we’d hate you to miss out on materials that could accelerate your progress.

So every four months there’s an ebook 25% ‘buono sconto’ promotion. On those happy occasions, there’s no limit on how many times you can use the coupon code.

By no coincidence at all, the EasyReaders.org seasonal ‘Beach Reads 25% coupon code’ promotion begins tomorrow, May 14th. Anyone already on their mailing list will hear about it then, wheezy breathing permitting.

However, for you, the thirty-thousand or so very special OnlineItalianClub.com members, who may or may not have opened today’s emailed article and read this far, I can reveal the 25% ‘Beach Reads’ buono sconto, which is already active from today:

2026-Beach-Reads-25%-Off

– Browse the catalog page

– Download free sample chapters for materials at your level

– Open the free sample chapters on your device, so you know what you’re getting, how it works, and whether it will help with your learning

– Back to the catalog page, where clicking on the ebook titles will take you to the ‘product page’ for each title, from where you can ‘add to cart’

– When you’re done ‘adding to cart’, view your cart page, copy/paste in the ‘buono sconto’, press the ‘Apply coupon’ button, and scroll down to check the cart total has been reduced by the expected 25% (not the prices of individual ebooks, which don’t change…)

Easy as pie! But please, please, check out the free samples first, which saves me hassle and grief.

If you don’t know how to read/listen to an ebook on your iPad, do us both a favor and find out (using the free sample chapter or chapters) BEFORE you buy.

Here’s that buono sconto again:

2026-Beach-Reads-25%-Off

Catalog page | Cart | FAQ

Alla prossima settimana!

What I’m reading/watching this week

Still going with Jonathan Lethem’s ‘Il detective selvaggio’, less than a hundred pages to read and the ebook library loan has three days left. I’m confident.
Back in Italy, back to the evening Netflix regime, the primary objective of which is to lull Bug to sleep. That’s been working less and less well as he’s grown into an insistent little fellow who knows his own mind: I DON’T WANT TO GO TO SLEEP! We’re still going with the first series of ER (in English), supplemented with ‘The Mentalist’ when we feel the need for something shorter and less gory. Yesterday evening we watched half an hour or so of 1973’s ‘The Sting’. Remember that? I’d never realised my wife had a thing for Paul Newman.

P.S.

And here’s the inevitable reminder to read/listen to Tuesday’s bulletin of news from EasyItalianNews.com which – unlike our ebooks – is completely FREE!

Reading/listening practice will help you consolidate the Italian you’re studying, expand your vocabulary, and build vital comprehension skills.

Subscribing, and so receiving all three text + audio bulletins of ‘easy’ news via email each week – on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays – is also FREE.

Just enter your email address on this page and click the confirmation link that will be sent to you.

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No time to read this? Why not find something to study instead? A1 – Beginner/Elementary | A2 – Pre-Intermediate | B1 – Intermediate | B2 – Upper-Intermediate | C1 – Advanced | C2 – Proficiency | What’s my level? | Italian level test

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Buondì.

Monday morning I nipped out to the pasty shop, down the road from my parents home in Cornwall, to make sure I’d have something to eat on the four and a half hour train journey back to London. But it was closed. So on the rather crowded train I ate half a packet of nuts and drank water, neither of which really helped pass the time.

Arriving at London’s Paddington Station (named after the famous bear, isn’t that cute) having passed through the machines controlling access to the platform, there – facing me – was a pasty shop! This because Paddington (the station not the bear) is the arrival point for trains from the South West. I guess there’s demand from hungry Cornish people arriving in the smoke. Last pasty before the border, fill up here!

Unfortunately the West Cornwall Pasty Company‘s Paddington Station outlet was shuttered, just like the shop I’d been relying on first thing that morning. Sigh.

I finally got to eat something at around six p.m. at the Gowlett Arms pub in Peckham Rye. It’s famous for its pizza, apparently, though I didn’t even consider trying one, which could have been a mistake. A bag of salt and vinegar crisps wasn’t much of a foundation for the several pints of Stan’s Chedddar Valley cider which slipped down almost without me noticing.

My daughter and her partner had narrowed-down dinner options to nearby places that wouldn’t require too much walking to. But when, over the last pint of cider, they pulled out their smartphones to check, both the Mexican and the Indian were closed.

We finally ended up at a ‘vegan fish and chip shop’, run by a guy from Northern Cyprus and his Turkish partner. I stammered out a few phrases in Turkish, which pleased them to the extent that we each were offered a glass of Jamaican rum on the house. Which pleased us. Never before have I seen a fish and chip shop with shelves of spirits behind the counter, as is typical in pubs and bars around the world. It’s a Cyprus thing, apparently.

So then, why did everything appeared to be closed in England on Monday? Turns out that May 4th this year was the ‘Early Spring Bank Holiday’, a description which – unlike Italy’s recent ‘festa della liberazione’ on April 25th (down with the Germans!) or May first’s ‘festa del lavoro’, known elsewhere as International Workers’ Day, (down with the bosses!) – sounds neither traditional nor particularly stirring.

Britain, which according to Napoleon Bonaparte was a nation of shopkeepers – these days shoplifters – doesn’t celebrate its toiling masses, though it does allow them the occasional Monday off, to get rained on on a Cornish beach or other damp location of their choice.

Anyway, to the point: before you visit Italy, Britain, or wherever is foreign to you, you’d be well-advised to do what I failed to do and check for national (and in Italy also local) holidays. Or take a packet of nuts, to be on the safe side.

In Britain maybe also avoid school holidays, especially ‘half-terms’, which fall on unpredictable dates and tend to make travelling more stressful and expensive.

Italian schoolchildren don’t have ‘half-term’ holidays, but consider avoiding August instead, when much of Italy is not only unbearably hot but also devoid of Italians. They’ll all have gone to London, to escape the heat and to complain about the food. In August Italy is basically closed, except for the beach resorts and tourist-trap cities like Venice, Florence, and – to an extent – Rome.

N.b. Our Italian school in Bologna remains open throughout August, and has air-con in all the classrooms. But the city itself is HOT. The best times to visit, that’s to say the periods with the nicest weather, are probably late-April to June (basically, now) and mid-September to mid-October.

By the way, I’m putting the finishing touches to this article at Stansted airport (did I finally manage to spell that right?) It’s Tuesday evening and there are still four hours to wait until my flight back home to Italy. Plenty of time, then, to head to ‘Spoons, for a plate of nachos and a final pint of good beer. Or two.

Alla prossima settimana, allora.

What I’m reading/watching this week

Finished the second ‘Claudius’ ebook, finally! The two volumes totalled more than eight hundred pages, in Italian, and all the characters seemed to have very similar, long, Latin names. Also also completed the personal finance ebook, Italian too, but shorter and much easier. I’ve just seen the same book in the airport bookshop (in English) priced at £16.99, which cheered me up a lot. Aren’t libraries wonderful?
I’ve also been reading the usual newspapers and magazines, mostly in English, some in Italian, and for the flight I have a newspaper each in French, Spanish and Swedish. Or I might just doze.
Talking of newspapers, it was thanks to an article in the Guardian about a resurgence in the popularity of detective fiction (sells well in ‘troubled times’), I discovered the writer Jonathan Lethem, and downloaded from the library the Italian translation of the book that the article mentioned, ‘Il detective selvaggio’ (English original title: The Feral Detective). If you like that sort of thing, it seems like a fun read.
No films, as I’ve been in England visiting and went to bed super-early the whole weeek. There was no Netflix, so my dad and I spent too many hours watching the world snooker championship, along with sundry antiques auctions and game shows. Snooker is huge in China these days, apparently. You read it here first.

P.S.

Don’t forget to read/listen to Tuesday’s bulletin of news from EasyItalianNews.com, will you? There’ll be a new one tomorrow (Thursday), another on Saturday, and so on. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday – text and audio in italiano – regular as clockwork!

Why should you care? Because reading/listening practice will help you consolidate the Italian you’re studying, expand your vocabulary, and build vital comprehension skills. Also because EasyItalianNews.com is FREE to read/listen to.

Subscribing, and so receiving all three text + audio bulletins of ‘easy’ news via email each week – on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays – is also FREE. Just enter your email address on this page and click the confirmation link that will be sent to you.

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OnlineItalianClub.com | EasyItalianNews.com | Shop (ebooks) | Shop (online lessons)

OnlineFrenchClub.com | OnlineSpanishClub.com | OnlineGermanClub.com

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No longer interested?

All bulk emails we send (including this one) contain an unsubscribe link, usually at the bottom. Scroll down to find it, click the link and select ‘unsubscribe’. That will permanently remove your email address from our ebooks mailing list.