Reading an Italian menu when you studied Spanish

You studied Spanish, and now you're holding a menu in a Bologna trattoria that looks about eighty percent readable. The trouble — and the fun — lives in the other twenty percent.

Spanish and Italian grew up at the same Latin table, so most of what you order carries across with barely a spelling change. But a handful of words look like old friends and mean something completely different, and food is exactly where they like to hide.

Most of the plate transfers

If you can read a Spanish menu, you can already read most of an Italian one. The staples line up almost one to one.

Whole stretches of the page decode themselves. Frutta is fruta, a salsa is a salsa, a zuppa is a sopa. Something salato is salado — salty. You know more of this menu than you think, which is precisely why the few exceptions are worth guarding against.

The four words that will trip you

These look familiar and betray you. Learn them before you sit down.

• burro — In Spanish, a donkey. In Italian, butter — and it will be sitting right next to your bread. (Butter in Spanish is mantequilla; a donkey in Italian is asino.)
• caldo — In Spanish, a broth. In Italian, it simply means hot. The broth you're picturing is brodo; caldo on a menu is describing temperature.
• gamba — In Spain, a prawn. In Italy, a leg. If you're after prawns, the word to look for is gamberi.
• aceto — One letter off from Spanish aceite (oil), so your eye fills in the wrong word. Aceto is vinegar. Oil is olio.

Where your Spanish runs out

A few everyday foods simply refuse to line up, and it pays to know them cold. Ham is jamón in Spanish but prosciutto in Italian. Cheese, as we'll see below, is queso against formaggio. Turkey is pavo in Madrid and tacchino in Rome; an apple is a manzana one place and a mela the other; rice is arroz or riso. None of these are traps — they just won't hand themselves to you, so file them as new words rather than waiting for a bridge that never comes.

Reading the menu from top to bottom

Italian menus follow a fixed order, and the section headings are more transparent than they look. Antipasti are the starters. Then come the primi and secondi — the same first and second courses your Spanish menu called primero and segundo.

The heading that catches people is contorni. In Spanish, a contorno is an outline or a contour. In Italian, it's the side dishes — the vegetables and potatoes meant to surround the main plate. At the bottom sit the dolci, the sweets, first cousin to Spanish dulce.

Drinks and sweets

The end of the meal transfers well too. Caffè is café, and a bottle of vino needs no translation at all. Gelato and Spanish helado look unrelated until you learn both descend from Latin gelatus, "frozen." Cioccolata is chocolate. And the opposite of that tricky caldo is freddo — which lands you right back on Spanish frío, cold.

Asking for the bill

When the evening winds down, one last cognate does the work: ask for il conto, the bill your Spanish has always called la cuenta. Both descend from the same Latin counting, a fitting place for the meal to close.

The point was never to memorise two separate menus. It's to see the single Latin skeleton under both — and to keep a short list of the words that wandered off. Learn that once, and the next carta, whether in Seville or in Siena, refracts into focus a little faster.