Introduction 1Part 1: Getting Your Bearings with the Basics 5Chapter 1: Greetings! Getting to Know You 7Chapter 2: Embedded Gender and Number: Nouns and Articles 19Chapter 3: Putting Two and Two Together: Numbers, Dates, and Time 33Part 2: Verbs as Building Blocks 45Chapter 4: Noting to Be or to Have with Essere and Avere 47Chapter 5: Forming the Present 61Chapter 6: Going and Coming with Irregular Verbs 73Part 3: Building Beautiful Sentences: Parts of Speech 87Chapter 7: Enriching Adjectives and Adverbs 89Chapter 8: Comparisons and Superlatives 103Chapter 9: Prepositions, and Then Some 113Chapter 10: La Mia Famiglia: Possessive Adjectives and Pronouns 127Chapter 11: Asking with Interrogatives; Pointing Out with Demonstratives 139Part 4: More Verb Tenses 149Chapter 12: Glancing Back at the Past: The Passato Prossimo 151Chapter 13: Once Upon a Time: The Imperfect 167Chapter 14: Looking Ahead: The Future Tense 183Chapter 15: Commanding and the Imperative 195Chapter 16: Forming and Using Conditional Verbs 211Chapter 17: Everyday Communication with Reflexives 223Part 5: The Part of Tens 237Chapter 18: Ten Practice Dialogues for When You're Out and About in Italy 239Chapter 19: Ten Common Word Swaps to Avoid 251Part 6: Appendixes 255Appendix A: English-Italian Dictionary 257Appendix B: Italian-English Dictionary 261Index 265
Teresa Picarazzi, PhD, has taught Italian language, literature, and cinema for more than 30 years. She now teaches Italian at The Hopkins School in New Haven. She has lived, studied, and worked in Florence, Siena, Urbino, Cortona, and Ravenna, Italy. She has written books and several articles on Italian politics and culture.