"Say cheese!" = "sorridi!" ("smile!")

In Italian, when taking a photo, we encourage our subject to smile by saying "sorridi!" ("smile!"), if you are being informal, "sorrida!", if you are being formal. If you were to translate directly from the English and say "dici formaggio!" your subject would be completely dumbfounded! If we happen to be taking a photo of more than one person, we say "sorridete!".

Often these days when teaching, as you turn from writing on the board towards the class, you see a mobile phone aimed at you and a student is taking a picture of what you've just written or the storyboard we are using. We make a joke of it of course: "Johnny Depp has joined us today!", or "When I loose weight, I'll be happy to pose for you!", etc. So yesterday, for fun, I took a photo of my class taking photos of of the board, which reminded me of some photos I took last october of tourists taking photos of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus and Primavera, at the Uffizi Gallery, and, of course, of Martin Parr's famous photograph (above) of tourists taking photos of Leonardo's La Gioconda at the Louvre Museum. Ecco le foto: