Mangiare translates “to eat”, but used on its own, mangiare is a much more serious verb. In Campania, mangiare means to really eat: multiple courses, pasta, meat, fruit, wine, coffee, and a nap. If you haven't done that, you haven't really eaten.
Some of the kids in the pizzeria would arrive around six-thirty for the evening shift and start snacking on pieces of ham, walnuts, whole roasted sausages, french fries, anything they could get their hands on.
“Bernado, are you hungry?” I would ask.
“Yes, I didn't eat today.”
At first I took Bernardo to be lying: he is always putting things in his mouth, how could he go all day, all the the way until six-thirty, without eating anything. Then I realized, Bernado had eaten: sandwiches, pastries, candy, you name it, but he hadn't really eaten. He hadn't sat down to a full Italian pranzo and eaten until he could not eat any more. He did not truly mangiare, and his evening hunger was justified.
Nino, the owner of the pizzeria, put himself on a diet the first week of August. He cut out beer, bread, big meals at night, and ate less pasta at lunch. He claimed to have lost sixteen pounds the first week. He did look slimmer.
One night, when he sat down to eat, a co-worker asked him how his diet was going. Nino looked up from the fourteen ounce steak and big bowl of salad he was eating, and said with great sincerity:
“A diet is a sacrifice. You don't eat.”
Of course he was eating. He just didn't mangiare.
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