释义 |
piazza /pɪˈatsə /noun1A public square or marketplace, especially in an Italian town.Here, folks stop to ‘take a coffee’ in one of the town's many piazzas, or public squares, as well as chat with friends during the nightly passeggiata, or evening stroll....- Beaches are popular recreation areas, especially with young people, who also enjoy ‘hanging out’ at the local piazza, or town square.
- He said the proposed office blocks and apartments would be linked to the city centre and included a number of public squares, parks and piazzas.
2US archaic The veranda of a house.The family also built a new detached kitchen directly behind the rear piazza and converted the fireplaces in the principal rooms of the main floor to coal....- Replicated in countless subsequent homes and public buildings, the piazza acts as a graceful connector between indoors and out.
- Enjoy your beautifully landscaped yard from your rear piazza, or your side gazebo as the warm island breezes encircles your family with comfort.
OriginLate 16th century: Italian. place from Old English: If you have been to Italy or Spain you have probably visited the piazza or plaza of a town. These words have the same origin as English place and French place ‘(public) square’, namely Latin platea ‘open space’, from Greek plateia hodos ‘broad way’. From the early Middle Ages, when it was adopted from French, place superseded stow (found in place names such as Stow on the Wold and Padstow) and stead, as in Wanstead. The sense ‘a space that can be occupied’ developed in Middle English from this. The orderly person's mantra a place for everything and everything in its place goes back to the 17th century, but the modern formulation first appears in the 1840s in Captain Frederick Marryat's nautical yarn Masterman Ready: ‘In a well-conducted man-of-war…every thing in its place, and there is a place for every thing.’ In 1897 the German Chancellor Prince Bernhard von Bülow, made a speech in the Reichstag in which he declared, ‘we desire to throw no one into the shade [in East Asia], but we also demand our place in the sun’. As a result the expression a place in the sun, ‘a position of favour or advantage’, has been associated with German nationalism. However, it is recorded much earlier, and is traceable back to the writings of the 17th-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal.
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