Snow Skills

Just where are the Winter Olympics being held, anyhow? While searching the web, I’ve noticed no less than three spellings for that city in Italy; Turin, Turino, and Torino. In the spirit of the Games, it’s ‘caio’ (Italian for a familiar goodbye) to confusion and ‘pronto’ (Italian for hello on the telephone) to figuring this out. Just what is the name of that place where most of the world’s best winter athletes are going to meet on February 10?!

From web sources and personal experience, here’s my best guess at the multiple spellings for that historic city:

Turin is the name that the English-speaking world is most familiar with, and that’s probably because the airport is called the Turin International Airport on international tickets. Despite that, the official title of the airport is Aeroporto Internazionale di Torino. According to my old tickets, I landed at the Turin airport 10 years ago.

Turino is consistent with how Italians refer to the city verbally and tends to show up in non-Italian newspapers and print. A number of non-Italian websites refer to Turino and that’s probably due to English-speaking folks trying to spell the word based on how they heard it. The itinerary for my trip stated we were going to spend a day in Turino. And, yes, that’s how I spelled it in a post on January 13.

Torino is the correct pronounciation and spelling as far as the Italians are concerned, so to paraphrase the old saying; “When in Torino…” This is the name of the city according to the Torino 2006 Olympics website and the International Olympic Committee website.

So, you’ll really impress your Italian friends if you spell and refer to Turin as Torino and the 20th Olympic Games as Torino 2006.

But, why should we call all thing by their native names in English. Then it would not be Munich, but München, not Copenhagen, but København, not Prague, but Praha and so on. Just because the name in Italian is Torino, does not at all mean that we in English should say or spell it that way. I’m from Gothenburg myself, and i just hate it when foreigners try to say Göteborg. The can never get it right, and why should they? As long as they’re referring to my city in English, the should refer to it with it’s English name. Och därmed basta!