Meals in Italy

Meals in Italy

My name is Maria and I'm Italian. In Italy, people eat different foods. We like pasta and pizza, but we don't eat them every day. We like a lot of different meat and fish. And we eat a lot of fruit and vegetables.

In my family, we have three meals a day. Breakfast is at eight o'clock. We eat fette biscottato, a type of breakfast bread, and have coffee with milk. Italian people usually drink a lot of coffee!

On work days, my lunch is always at one o'clock. I never have lunch in my office. I usually have a panino (that's a sandwich) or a slice of pizza with my friends in a café near the office. At the weekend I have lunch at home with my family.

Dinner is the big meal of the day for a lot of Italians. In my family, we always have dinner at half past eight. We have rice or pasta, then fish with vegetables. We don't eat a lot of meat. After dinner, we usually have fruit and coffee, but at the weekend we sometimes have cake.

From: GODFREY, Rachel (2016) Empower A1 Starter. Cambridge University Press.

Student Adam Brown talks about growing up in a tiny house

 Student Adam Brown talks about growing up in a tiny house

 

I was nine when my parents first had the idea of moving from a normal-sized flat in the city to a small place in the countryside, and I was eleven by the time we actually did it. And when I say small, I mean really, really small. Our new home was about the size of a typical garage. Compared to the car-park-sized flat where we used to live, it was tiny.

 

We built our tiny house ourselves on a piece of land about two hours’ drive from the city. We used to go there every weekend and during holidays to work on it, but, even so, it took nearly two years to finish. My mum designed the house to include all the basic things that a normal house has but fitted into a much smaller space. My ‘bedroom’ was built in a space under the roof that I could reach by ladder.

 

My parents were very happy with our new life. They enjoyed being able to grow our own fruit and vegetables and keep chickens to provide us with eggs. They were particularly pleased about not having to pay for power and fuel because we could produce our own electricity from the sun. We also collected wood from the land around us to burn for heat.

 

I remember that I took me a few months to get used to living in such a small place. At first, I missed having all my favourite toys and books around me. Before we moved from the city, we had had to give away most of our things because there wasn’t enough room for them anymore, but now I don’t mind having fewer things. And one thing I love about our tiny home is being able to spend so much more time outside – something I didn’t do in the city very often. And I do a lot more things with my parents, which is great.

 

I’m away at university now, and share a flat with other students, where my bedroom is about the same size as my whole family home! When I go back to see my parents, I find it hard to manage now in such a small space. I don’t think I’ll choose ‘tiny living’ for myself in the future, but I’m glad that I’ve had the experience of it.