In Italian, food is rarely just food. It organizes time, relationships, and expectations. This column explores Italian sayings and proverbs as ways of thinking shaped at the table.
These expressions preserve that knowledge in compact form. Read literally, they speak about eating. Read more closely, they offer insight into how experience, pleasure, and social life are understood.
The aim is simple: to treat language as another ingredient—handled with care, tasted slowly, and shared. No prior appetite required. It tends to arrive along the way.
Fare il pesce in barile
Literal translation: To play the fish in the barrel
Meaning: To remain deliberately noncommittal, feigning ignorance or indifference to avoid being drawn into a situation
English speakers shoot fish in a barrel. Italians become one.
The cast is identical, but the two languages draw very different conclusions. In English, the trapped aquatic creature is an absurdly easy target. In Italian, it has developed a surprisingly effective survival strategy: stay still, say nothing, and wait for the trouble to pass.
Fare il pesce in barile describes someone who sees what is happening but pretends not to notice, usually because taking a position would mean becoming involved or accepting responsibility. Perhaps two friends are arguing, and both expect support. Perhaps a colleague asks a question whose honest answer would be inconvenient. Perhaps a decision has consequences no one wants to own. At such moments, the Italian fish does not speak, choose sides, or draw attention to itself. It simply disappears among the others. The ignorance is feigned, the passivity calculated.
The comparison becomes clearer when we picture the contents of a traditional fish barrel. For centuries, anchovies, sardines, and herring were cleaned, salted or preserved in brine, and packed tightly together for storage and transport. Often headless, each looked exactly like its companions: one small fish among hundreds, with nothing to distinguish it from the rest. It could pass entirely unnoticed.
Italian makes the image still more precise in the variant fare l’acciuga in barile. Rather than adding a new shade of meaning, the variant simply gives the generic fish a name. It becomes an anchovy but remains just as anonymous among the countless others packed beside it.
The earliest example currently identified shows this strategy at work in suitably frustrating circumstances. In a letter dated to 1890, the sculptor Ernesto Biondi complains, the sculptor Ernesto Biondi complains to the art critic Vittore Grubicy that the bronze caster Alessandro Nelli fa ancora il pesce in barile. Asked for a clear decision about their contract, Nelli offers neither agreement nor refusal. The phrase captures the exasperation of dealing with someone whose only firm decision is not to decide.
If Biondi used the expression to complain about an evasive man, the Bolognese writer Riccardo Bacchelli went one step further. In his 1927 novel Il diavolo al Pontelungo, a character is known simply as Pesce in Barile. The barrel supplies the entire portrait: in three words, Bacchelli turns a strategy of evasion into a distinctive personality.
The fish in the barrel may appear helpless, but appearances are its specialty. It survives by mastering the difficult art of being unmistakably present while making responsibility impossible to pin down.
Love discovering Italy one bite at a time? Subscribe to the free Appetito newsletter for the latest in food, travel, recipes, and Italian culture stories.
