Feelings with names

The eighth entry is l’angoscia, and the sentence it sits in shows a habit that runs through the whole list: prima dell’esame lo prende l’angoscia. Word for word that is « before the exam, him takes the anxiety » — the feeling is the subject, the person is an object pronoun, and the subject turns up after the verb. English will not build a plain sentence that way. It puts the person in front and moves the feeling into an adjective or a verb: « before the exam he gets anxious ». This is not a quirk of one line. L’invidia non lo lascia dormire, l’impazienza rovina la trattativa, la commozione gli ha spezzato la voce, la vanità gli fa rifare la foto tre volte — in every one of them the noun does the acting and the person is on the receiving end. Two things follow for anybody writing Italian. The article in front of that subject is compulsory, so invidia non lo lascia dormire is wrong. And the person attaches as an unstressed pronoun — lo, gli, le — set before the verb, never after it. Read the feeling as the agent and these sentences stop looking inverted.