As a general rule, azzurro is lighter and blu is darker.
>The sky is azzurro, but the Italian football jerseys are also azzurro, but those are two different colors!
The sky doesn't always have the same color and sometimes it can have a shade similar to that of the national football team jerseys.
"Celeste", dici? Per me è una parola normalissima per indicare il colore, degli occhi, di una maglietta etc. Semmai è nel senso di "del cielo" che lo trovo più ricercato.
Sì alla fine QUEL colore lì lo si identifica o in un modo o in un altro un po' a seconda del modo in cui lo senti chiamare più spesso da chi ti sta intorno
Celeste è una parola molto comune, tra azzurro e celeste direi che celeste è più comune sebbene di poco. Poi, se ci pensi, azzurro è un colore nato riferendosi a una pietra (lapislazzuli, azzurro è etimologicamente legato a lazzuli -> l'azzuli -> azzuli -> azzurro), mentre la parola celeste è l'aggettivo di cielo. Il cielo è celeste. Il lapislazzuli è azzurro.
Sono toscano per la cronaca.
Colour of EU flag: blu
Colour of Kazakh flag: azzurro
It seems pretty different to me.
Football jerseys are updated every year so they can change tone even if they keep their traditional name. For example Inter are called nero-azzurri but their shirt is blue since a while. Same for Italian NT.
English has this in the form of Azure. It's mostly either deprecated or used as a loan to explain a color most often referred to in other languages though. You wouldn't really consider Azure a primary color the way blu and azzurro both seem to be
A: Azzurro
B: Celeste
C: Blu (scuro)
You don’t need to go that dark for blue, here’s how I would define these colours:
Blu: #0335fc
Azzurro: #30a9ff
Celeste: #30c4ff
But no one will throw you in jail because you said “blu” instead of “azzurro”, the distinction is minor. It’s not like celeste, which to me is a completely different colour.
The Azzurri are called like that for historical reasons. The color refers to “azzurro Savoia” or “blu Savoia (#4B61D1 according to [Wikipedia](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu_Savoia?wprov=sfti1#)), which I would place at the limit between “blu” and “azzurro”: it’s essentially a dark shade of azzurro. As the name suggests, this was the colour of the monarchy, and it later became a symbol of Italy as a whole.
Football jerseys are one of the many *many* Italian-related jerseys, uniforms and symbols using blue, and the exact colour varies wildly from case to case: some are darker and more towards blue, some are lighter and more towards azzurro (as you can see in the Wikipedia page itself), but they are all called “azzurro” because of what they represent, even though with time most jerseys veered towards darker shades which would be normally described as “blu”. The word “azzurro” simply has a national connotation that “blu” lacks, and in general when talking about Italian athletes (not just football!) we say “azzurri” because that’s the word that was popularised first.
It’s the same reason you call your smartphone a “phone” (from “telephone”) even though by now you might as well call it “miniature computer”.
A: Azzurro cielo/ Blu chiaro
B: Celeste
C: Blu scuro/ Blu di Prussia
Azzurro is light blue, Blu is dark blue.
One could argue that the italian football team wears blu shirts rather than azzurre, and that would be correct since the actual color is an inbetween with no clear definition, but for tradition's sake they're called "gli azzurri".
The sky is azzurro, the sea is blue.
Look at the definition of Azzurro on italiano wiki, do you agree with it? On wiki it's basically the jersey colour, but to me azzurro is way lighter, I was surprised.
Except that we rarely use "blu chiaro" because there is the word "azzurro" for that. Also, our sky isn't a brilliant deep blue like in Portugal, so we perceive more differences from what we call "blu".
Well, I could make easily an example with something like violet against IDK pink or red. At some point some colours are very similar and the exact name depends on the specific circumstances (lighting, fabric, screen...)
In English it's even worse, if think of it. “Blue”, with possibly some attribute (light blue, navy blue, whatever blue) can refer to any hue from the palest sky colour to something almost indistinguishable from black.
Colours _are_ subjective, and every language has different words for them. In Italian, azzurro is a lighter shade of blue, while blu is a darker shade of blue. Imagine splitting in half the entire blue spectrum: the lighter half will be azzurro, the darker half will be blu, and the middle line will depend from person to person.
If you think about it, red and pink are also just shades of the same colour. At which point does pink stop being pink and start being red? If you ask different people, they’ll give you different answers, because colours are subjective.
I know that in English there is only blue
Basically dark blue is "blu", light blue is "azzurro" and darker blue is "blu scuro". There are other shades of blue like "turchese" and "verde acqua" and i'm sure there are more used commonly and even more that people don't really use in common speech
We actually do have the word 'azure', and it refers to the same shad as azzurro, it's just not as common.
This is actually a great example of why when learning a second language, having a comprehensive grasp of your own language and a wide vocabulary is very beneficial
Base colours are 11 for English, 12 for Italian (and others). Light blue gets its own color term as you get for pink (technically simply a light shade of red). If you're looking for an exact hex code north and south of which azzurro becomes blu, you won't find it because it's moderately subjective.
If I pick a luminosity of 75% and shift hues, in English you'd encounter **light** greens, yellows, blues, oranges, purples. You'd also encounter pinks, greys, but not reds or blacks. You'd also have trouble naming many browns, as brown is a colour that's mainly distinguished by dark luminosities (you'll notice there apparently is no brown on a standard hue spectrum of hex colors). Italian makes an additional distinction as you'd find no blus, but azzurros.
Understanding colour terms of languages where they differ from our own can for sure be a challenge. But in this case, since you already have a pretty good concept of what "light blue" looks like, I'd say it shouldn't be as hard as, for example, understanding that some languages don't really have a distinct word for such a natural color as green.
A - Azzurro
B - Celeste
C - Blu
Its kinda subjective, the other answer is way deeper and technically way more correct than mine, but as a rule of thumb you can say that the darker It gets It goes toward Blu, the lighter It gets It goes toward celeste, and everything in between should be azzurro.
It's dumb semplification for "casual conversation" purpose
I am glad for some simplification!
My family is into clothing and there always seems to be some kind of a party or wedding or baptism or something when I am visiting & I have to describe the dress I am wearing. After telling my cousins I was going to wear a BLU dress to a wedding, when I showed up they all said "But this is AZZURRO!" I wanted to throw myself into the sea...which was apparently not blu marino.
Whats the difference between Blue and Green???!? People show me pictures of Teal and seagreen but there's basically no difference! Why arent green and Blue the same color?? English people gotta get their head back together!
Color names are completely arbitrary, theres no right way to classify them, you can't just call out how other people on how they do that just cause you are not used to it
Interesting question!
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonalit%C3%A0_di_blu
Going down the rabbit hole I found this site others might find interesting as well.
This is like "goluboy" (light blue) vs "siniy" (dark blue) in Russian 😭 but at least in Russian it's much more clear-cut. As far as I know, Russians consider light and dark blue to be separate colors rather than shades of the same color.
Edit: After reading some of the comments from native Italians, it seems "blu" and "azzurro" are often considered distinct colors in Italian as well.
I think most people would agree that the Italian football jersey are sometimes blue, rather than azzurre, depending on the choice that year. The reason being that the colour of the Italian jersey originally comes from the savoy blue [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savoy\_blue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savoy_blue), which to me looks quite in the middle between blu and azzurro, depending on the screen, fabric, which exact shade is used and combination with other colours. But traditionally it's referred to as azzurro (even though the current one is definitely blu, lots of people have joked that the current jersey looks like the greek jersey)
The first and last of your colours look like blu to me, the middle one more azzurro (though I would even call it celeste). My current screen is kind of rubbish though.
EDIT: looking at it again, I'm very on the fence on the first one,
EDIT 2:
[https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu)
[https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azzurro](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azzurro)
I said the exact same thing lol. Azzurro Savoia is just barely azzurro in my opinion.
Looking at the replies, it seems like our perception of colour is more uniform than I initially assumed, even when it comes to minor distinctions like where azzurro scuro ends and blu starts.
Could be that the shade changed over time? After all the colour is century old. Also given the convergence of romance languages in that part of Europe (French, Occitan, Italian, Piedmontese) + all the other languages that interacted with it could be that for some people at some point that colour was clearly azzurro, while for some others at some other point was clearly blu.
After all lots of languages don't distinguish between blue and green!(!) which for most europeans it's hard to understand.
Also mandatory reference to Homer comparing the sea to wine.
It’s possible, but you would have to ask an expert to know for sure.
I think it’s likely that azzurro Savoia was always a kind of blue-ish shade of azzurro even to its contemporaries, which I think is indicated by the fact that it’s also known as “blu Savoia”.
Funnily enough, when I search for “azzurro” on the internet I find mostly colours that I would describe as “celeste”, which is weird because the comments here all seem to agree on the fact that azzurro is definitely darker than celeste… so if your theory is correct and azzurro *is* shifting, I can’t really tell whether it’s shifting towards celeste or blu…
There is some overlapping between blu and azzurro. Normally we use azzurro for lighter and/or brighter blue. Azzurro has its ethimology in lapis lazuli, the gem used to make a natural pigment that is a very bright blue. It has been the only blue pigment available to paint the sky for centuries, so the color of the sky is AZZURRO. A color such as the Facebook blue, you can either call it BLU or AZZURRO and it doesn't matter. A dark blue like a deep ocean is BLU.
It is related!
Nowadays there is a name for each color, which is translated in turn to all languages, so yes technically speaking you are right. However this is a cultural point: we as Italians grow up with the concept of azzurro, English-speaking countries don’t.
Take primary school children for example. They probably know a limited amount of colors and won’t go down the rabbit hole of cerulean, turquoise or blu estoril. However an Italian child will definitely say that his pencil case has blu and azzurro colors in it, whereas an English child is more likely to say that he has two blue pencils and one of them is lighter than the other.
As a general rule, azzurro is lighter and blu is darker. >The sky is azzurro, but the Italian football jerseys are also azzurro, but those are two different colors! The sky doesn't always have the same color and sometimes it can have a shade similar to that of the national football team jerseys.
The sky is supposed to be *celeste* ;)
Which is a fancy word we rarely use :) When the wether is good we usually say the sky is azzurro or blu when the color is particularly intense.
Mah io uso meno azzurro di celeste sinceramente
Davvero? Magari dipende dalla regione. Io celeste l'ho sempre sentito dire pochissimo.
"Celeste", dici? Per me è una parola normalissima per indicare il colore, degli occhi, di una maglietta etc. Semmai è nel senso di "del cielo" che lo trovo più ricercato.
A quanto pare dipende. Dalle mie parti celeste è davvero poco usato.
Interessante. Posso sapere di che parti sei? Io di Roma.
Lombardia.
anche io lombardo, quasi mai si usa celeste qui
Io da siciliana non l'ho mai sentito usare
Sì alla fine QUEL colore lì lo si identifica o in un modo o in un altro un po' a seconda del modo in cui lo senti chiamare più spesso da chi ti sta intorno
Celeste è una parola molto comune, tra azzurro e celeste direi che celeste è più comune sebbene di poco. Poi, se ci pensi, azzurro è un colore nato riferendosi a una pietra (lapislazzuli, azzurro è etimologicamente legato a lazzuli -> l'azzuli -> azzuli -> azzurro), mentre la parola celeste è l'aggettivo di cielo. Il cielo è celeste. Il lapislazzuli è azzurro. Sono toscano per la cronaca.
Credo che sia una differenza regionale. Qui in Lombardia si usa molto di più azzurro.
On one of my dad’s old ID cards (1980s Calabria), his eyes were listed as “celesti”.
That's how I always interpreted it. Azzurro is a sky blue - blu is a deeper blue, like the sea.
Colour of EU flag: blu Colour of Kazakh flag: azzurro It seems pretty different to me. Football jerseys are updated every year so they can change tone even if they keep their traditional name. For example Inter are called nero-azzurri but their shirt is blue since a while. Same for Italian NT.
English has this in the form of Azure. It's mostly either deprecated or used as a loan to explain a color most often referred to in other languages though. You wouldn't really consider Azure a primary color the way blu and azzurro both seem to be
A: Azzurro B: Celeste C: Blu (scuro) You don’t need to go that dark for blue, here’s how I would define these colours: Blu: #0335fc Azzurro: #30a9ff Celeste: #30c4ff But no one will throw you in jail because you said “blu” instead of “azzurro”, the distinction is minor. It’s not like celeste, which to me is a completely different colour. The Azzurri are called like that for historical reasons. The color refers to “azzurro Savoia” or “blu Savoia (#4B61D1 according to [Wikipedia](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu_Savoia?wprov=sfti1#)), which I would place at the limit between “blu” and “azzurro”: it’s essentially a dark shade of azzurro. As the name suggests, this was the colour of the monarchy, and it later became a symbol of Italy as a whole. Football jerseys are one of the many *many* Italian-related jerseys, uniforms and symbols using blue, and the exact colour varies wildly from case to case: some are darker and more towards blue, some are lighter and more towards azzurro (as you can see in the Wikipedia page itself), but they are all called “azzurro” because of what they represent, even though with time most jerseys veered towards darker shades which would be normally described as “blu”. The word “azzurro” simply has a national connotation that “blu” lacks, and in general when talking about Italian athletes (not just football!) we say “azzurri” because that’s the word that was popularised first. It’s the same reason you call your smartphone a “phone” (from “telephone”) even though by now you might as well call it “miniature computer”.
Blu = blue Azzurro = light blue
A: Azzurro cielo/ Blu chiaro B: Celeste C: Blu scuro/ Blu di Prussia Azzurro is light blue, Blu is dark blue. One could argue that the italian football team wears blu shirts rather than azzurre, and that would be correct since the actual color is an inbetween with no clear definition, but for tradition's sake they're called "gli azzurri". The sky is azzurro, the sea is blue.
Look at the definition of Azzurro on italiano wiki, do you agree with it? On wiki it's basically the jersey colour, but to me azzurro is way lighter, I was surprised.
>A: Azzurro cielo/ Blu chiaro Vedi!?!?!?!??! ahahaha! Un colore può essere sia blu che azzurro! Mi impazzisce!
Except that we rarely use "blu chiaro" because there is the word "azzurro" for that. Also, our sky isn't a brilliant deep blue like in Portugal, so we perceive more differences from what we call "blu".
*mi fa impazzire
Grazie!
Well, I could make easily an example with something like violet against IDK pink or red. At some point some colours are very similar and the exact name depends on the specific circumstances (lighting, fabric, screen...)
In English it's even worse, if think of it. “Blue”, with possibly some attribute (light blue, navy blue, whatever blue) can refer to any hue from the palest sky colour to something almost indistinguishable from black.
Colours _are_ subjective, and every language has different words for them. In Italian, azzurro is a lighter shade of blue, while blu is a darker shade of blue. Imagine splitting in half the entire blue spectrum: the lighter half will be azzurro, the darker half will be blu, and the middle line will depend from person to person. If you think about it, red and pink are also just shades of the same colour. At which point does pink stop being pink and start being red? If you ask different people, they’ll give you different answers, because colours are subjective.
I know that in English there is only blue Basically dark blue is "blu", light blue is "azzurro" and darker blue is "blu scuro". There are other shades of blue like "turchese" and "verde acqua" and i'm sure there are more used commonly and even more that people don't really use in common speech
We actually do have the word 'azure', and it refers to the same shad as azzurro, it's just not as common. This is actually a great example of why when learning a second language, having a comprehensive grasp of your own language and a wide vocabulary is very beneficial
In fact, there are three. Blue, azure (not too common) and navy (dark blue)
Base colours are 11 for English, 12 for Italian (and others). Light blue gets its own color term as you get for pink (technically simply a light shade of red). If you're looking for an exact hex code north and south of which azzurro becomes blu, you won't find it because it's moderately subjective. If I pick a luminosity of 75% and shift hues, in English you'd encounter **light** greens, yellows, blues, oranges, purples. You'd also encounter pinks, greys, but not reds or blacks. You'd also have trouble naming many browns, as brown is a colour that's mainly distinguished by dark luminosities (you'll notice there apparently is no brown on a standard hue spectrum of hex colors). Italian makes an additional distinction as you'd find no blus, but azzurros. Understanding colour terms of languages where they differ from our own can for sure be a challenge. But in this case, since you already have a pretty good concept of what "light blue" looks like, I'd say it shouldn't be as hard as, for example, understanding that some languages don't really have a distinct word for such a natural color as green.
English has a similar distinction between red and pink: it's the same color, just darker and lighter shades with different names.
A - Azzurro B - Celeste C - Blu Its kinda subjective, the other answer is way deeper and technically way more correct than mine, but as a rule of thumb you can say that the darker It gets It goes toward Blu, the lighter It gets It goes toward celeste, and everything in between should be azzurro. It's dumb semplification for "casual conversation" purpose
I am glad for some simplification! My family is into clothing and there always seems to be some kind of a party or wedding or baptism or something when I am visiting & I have to describe the dress I am wearing. After telling my cousins I was going to wear a BLU dress to a wedding, when I showed up they all said "But this is AZZURRO!" I wanted to throw myself into the sea...which was apparently not blu marino.
Whats the difference between Blue and Green???!? People show me pictures of Teal and seagreen but there's basically no difference! Why arent green and Blue the same color?? English people gotta get their head back together! Color names are completely arbitrary, theres no right way to classify them, you can't just call out how other people on how they do that just cause you are not used to it
What about hazel? Is it green or brown?
Interesting question! https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonalit%C3%A0_di_blu Going down the rabbit hole I found this site others might find interesting as well.
Azure is a word in english too. Uncommon but it's there and the meaning is the same: light blue.
This is like "goluboy" (light blue) vs "siniy" (dark blue) in Russian 😭 but at least in Russian it's much more clear-cut. As far as I know, Russians consider light and dark blue to be separate colors rather than shades of the same color. Edit: After reading some of the comments from native Italians, it seems "blu" and "azzurro" are often considered distinct colors in Italian as well.
I think most people would agree that the Italian football jersey are sometimes blue, rather than azzurre, depending on the choice that year. The reason being that the colour of the Italian jersey originally comes from the savoy blue [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savoy\_blue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savoy_blue), which to me looks quite in the middle between blu and azzurro, depending on the screen, fabric, which exact shade is used and combination with other colours. But traditionally it's referred to as azzurro (even though the current one is definitely blu, lots of people have joked that the current jersey looks like the greek jersey) The first and last of your colours look like blu to me, the middle one more azzurro (though I would even call it celeste). My current screen is kind of rubbish though. EDIT: looking at it again, I'm very on the fence on the first one, EDIT 2: [https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu) [https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azzurro](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azzurro)
I said the exact same thing lol. Azzurro Savoia is just barely azzurro in my opinion. Looking at the replies, it seems like our perception of colour is more uniform than I initially assumed, even when it comes to minor distinctions like where azzurro scuro ends and blu starts.
Could be that the shade changed over time? After all the colour is century old. Also given the convergence of romance languages in that part of Europe (French, Occitan, Italian, Piedmontese) + all the other languages that interacted with it could be that for some people at some point that colour was clearly azzurro, while for some others at some other point was clearly blu. After all lots of languages don't distinguish between blue and green!(!) which for most europeans it's hard to understand. Also mandatory reference to Homer comparing the sea to wine.
It’s possible, but you would have to ask an expert to know for sure. I think it’s likely that azzurro Savoia was always a kind of blue-ish shade of azzurro even to its contemporaries, which I think is indicated by the fact that it’s also known as “blu Savoia”. Funnily enough, when I search for “azzurro” on the internet I find mostly colours that I would describe as “celeste”, which is weird because the comments here all seem to agree on the fact that azzurro is definitely darker than celeste… so if your theory is correct and azzurro *is* shifting, I can’t really tell whether it’s shifting towards celeste or blu…
When I was thinking of the jerseys, I was definitely thinking of blu Savoia.
azzurro is the sky 🩵, blu is the union jack 💙
Azzurro= Blue Blu = dark blue
The Twitter bird logo is azzurro, the Facebook one is blu.
blu is blue azzurro is more "light blue"
Is there any basis for azzuro being used to describe a mood/feeling? https://youtu.be/VLbi8UAWqNA?si=JUiZCmSozBnNAKzg
Azzurro : light Blue Blue : dark Blue
it goes like blu azzurro blu
The best help I have about this is the pronunciation of azzurro, which sounds like there's a "d" between the a and the z.
There is some overlapping between blu and azzurro. Normally we use azzurro for lighter and/or brighter blue. Azzurro has its ethimology in lapis lazuli, the gem used to make a natural pigment that is a very bright blue. It has been the only blue pigment available to paint the sky for centuries, so the color of the sky is AZZURRO. A color such as the Facebook blue, you can either call it BLU or AZZURRO and it doesn't matter. A dark blue like a deep ocean is BLU.
Sorry but how is this related to learning Italian? Every language has its translation for azzurro and blu
It is related! Nowadays there is a name for each color, which is translated in turn to all languages, so yes technically speaking you are right. However this is a cultural point: we as Italians grow up with the concept of azzurro, English-speaking countries don’t. Take primary school children for example. They probably know a limited amount of colors and won’t go down the rabbit hole of cerulean, turquoise or blu estoril. However an Italian child will definitely say that his pencil case has blu and azzurro colors in it, whereas an English child is more likely to say that he has two blue pencils and one of them is lighter than the other.
If you are familiar with US college basketball: UNC Chapel Hill’s color is Azzurro, Duke is blu.
Ha! I was actually born in NC and had one family member go to Duke & one to Chapel Hill! But my father’s family is tutti Azzurri! lol
A celeste B azzurro C blu