Shopping and money

Halfway down this list stands la moneta, and an English reader who sees « money » inside it will misread every sentence it turns up in. Mi servono monete per il carrello is about the coins in a pocket and nothing else. La moneta is the metal disc, one of them, countable, with a plural of its own: due monete, un mucchio di monete. In the singular and without an article it narrows further, to change: non ho moneta is said at a till and means the speaker has no coins on them, not that they are penniless. For money in the English sense, what a person has and spends, Italian reaches for two other words — i soldi in speech, il denaro in writing — and neither of them is ever a single coin. The one further job la moneta does is to name the currency of a country, as in la moneta unica, the single currency, which is a system rather than a sum. The rule at the counter is short. If it could be counted out on a palm, it is moneta; if it could only be added up, it is i soldi.