Stefano:	Sai cosa mi diverte fare quando ho del tempo libero e non posso uscire? Leggo i racconti di gare sportive estreme, o quelli di competizioni curiose e divertenti.
Benedetta:	Davvero? Che strano passatempo! Beh, allora fammi ridere con il racconto di qualche buffa gara che si svolge in Italia.
Stefano:	Hai mai sentito parlare del “Gonfalone” di Arpinio?
Benedetta:	No! So che la città di Arpinio si trova nel Lazio e che ha dato i natali a Cicerone il politico e filosofo dell’antica Roma… ma nulla di più.
Stefano:	Allora… il Gonfalone è una manifestazione folkloristica, in cui si svolgono una serie di gare di velocità davvero curiose: c’è la corsa con gli asini, quella dentro ai sacchi e anche quella con delle giare di terracotta sopra il capo.
Benedetta:	Che competizioni assurde!

This week will serve as an introduction to the Italian conjunction. In this lesson, our focus will be on affirmative connecting conjunctions, which are extremely common in the language. By the end of this lesson, you will know when and how to use these specific conjunctions, but first, let’s take a look at how conjunctions function in general and what purpose they serve.

Overall, conjunctions serve to connect parts of a sentence. And, but, or, and yet are among the more common ones in English. Conjunctions can be classified by two things: their form, and their syntactic function. In regards to their form, conjunctions can either be simple or compound. This is determined simply by the amount of words they contain. Simple conjunctions are only one word, while compound conjunctions are either two words or a blend of more than one word.

As for syntactic function, we have two types as well: coordinating and subordinate conjunctions. Coordinating conjunctions connect words, clauses and sentences. We will devote a few lectures on the many types of coordinating conjunctions that exist in Italian, after which we will move on to subordinate conjunctions.

Subordinate conjunctions connect clauses, one of which is syntactically subordinate to the main clause. This conjunction, which separates the main clause form the subordinate clause, sheds light on the relationship between both clauses and lets the reader know which clause bears the more important information.

This lesson will focus on affirmative connecting conjunctions; in Italian, we have 3:

e=and
anche = also/too/as well
pure = also/too/as well

E is a direct translation of the English and and is used in the same way:

Emilia Romagna e Toscana sono due regioni d’Italia. Emilia Romagna and Tuscany are two regions of Italy. Siamo andati al supermercato e abbiamo comprato del pane. We went to the store and bought some bread.

Though anche and pure mean the same thing, essentially, the former is generally more common. Anche, when followed by io can contract with the pronoun and form anch’io, though this is not required; both forms are grammatically correct.

Anch’io sono nato nell’anno 1990! Anche io sono nato nell’anno 1990! I was also born in 1990!

Pure is normally preferred when there is a sort of correlation between two (or more) things, as follows:

Giancarlo è nato a Roma, e suo marito pure. Giancarlo was born in Rome, and his husband was too.

The example above highlights a similarity between Giancarlo and his husband, (their birthplace), meaning that pure would be a better fit than anche. Additionally, pure is often preceded by the adverbs così and come, which are used as intensifiers:

Oggi ho mangiato una pizza a pranzo, e così pure ieri. Yesterday I ate pizza for lunch, just like yesterday. Nel mio corso di educazione fisica, ci fanno correre molto, come pure giocare a pallacanestro e nuotare. In my P.E. class, they make us run a lot, as well as play basketball and swim.