Original photo by Vahit Ozalp/ iStock
The next time you find yourself enjoying a grilled sandwich, impress any nearby Italian speakers by using its proper name: panino, not panini. The latter term is actually plural, while panino — a diminutive of pane, meaning “bread” — is singular.
This is similar to several other Italian words we English speakers tend to use incorrectly, such as graffiti (singular: graffito) and paparazzi (singular: paparazzo). Italian panini also differ from the kind eaten in the U.S. in that they aren’t always grilled and tend to feature just two or three ingredients.
Oops, incorrect!
It's a fibFollowing the same construction as panini/panino, a single strand of spaghetti is a spaghetto. The same is true of ravioli (raviolo) and gnocchi (gnocco).
Italians have been making sandwiches for centuries, but panini as we think of them today were popularized in Milan in the 1970s. It was there that bars known as paninoteche became so popular that an entire fashion-based youth movement, called paninaro, took its name from them. Young people known as paninari tended to hang out at these sandwich bars because they’d grown weary of the slow pace of other more classic Italian restaurants, and panini were the closest thing to fast food available in the area at the time. Paninari were so hip at the time, in fact, that they inspired a song by Pet Shop Boys. Those must have been some pretty good sandwiches.
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The modern pizza was invented in ______.
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The modern pizza was invented in Naples.
Margherita pizza was named in honor of an Italian queen.
Raffaele Esposito, a baker from Naples often credited with inventing the modern pizza, is believed to have named the dish in honor of Queen Margherita of Savoy (sound familiar?) after she visited his city in 1889. In addition, he used the Italian flag’s three colors as inspiration for its main ingredients: red tomatoes, white mozzarella, and green basil.
As the pizza increased in popularity, it also helped improve the reputation of the humble tomato, which had been feared throughout Europe for centuries because it was incorrectly thought to be poisonous. After realizing the true reason some aristocrats were falling ill was because the pewter plates used to serve the fruits contained high levels of lead, attitudes toward the tomato relaxed by the late 1800s.
Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.
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