Dietro is such an important word. It has its origin in the Latin "de retro." It's both an adverb and a preposition but it can also be a noun. It can be used in lots of different contexts.

In this lesson, we'd like to take a look at a relatively modern noun containing the word dietro: dietrologia, not to be confused with dietologia (the study of diets).

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In the final segment of episode 4 of I Bastardi di Pizzofalcone the murderer turned out to be the son of a famous professor, rather than an ex-convict everyone assumed was the criminal. The TV news highlighted how shocking that was. The prosecutor comments to her boss on how ironic that is. 

Their conversation goes like this:

La città si stupisce se uno come Renato Forgione commette un delitto, ma se lo commette uno come Varricchio rientra tutto nell'ordine normale delle cose. -Va be', dottoressa su, non facciamo dietrologia. -La conosciamo la stampa, no?

The city is stunned if someone like Renato Forgione commits a crime, but if someone like Varricchio commits it, it's all part of the normal order of things. -OK, Ma'am, come on, let's not look for hidden significance. We are acquainted with the press, right?

Captions 6-10, I Bastardi di Pizzofalcone EP4 Gelo - Part 24

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Dietrologia is a word we haven't encountered in Yabla videos before and so we decided to delve a bit deeper to understand the term better. We learn, from an article (in Italian) about the evolution of translating the term "conspiracy theory" into Italian, that dietrologia was coined for the first time, in the April 10, 1974 issue of “Corriere della Sera” (p. 3), in an article by Luca Goldoni. 

It means "the study of what's behind." This might be a good thing, but having been coined in the years following the assassination of JFK in 1963, in which there were a great many "conspiracy theories" about what "really" happened, it tends to have more to do with paranoia than with research. 

There's a slang term: farsi delle pare (to be paranoid) that is closely related to fare dietrologia. In other words, "What is he or she really thinking?" "Who profits?"

Here's one idea of the term from an article that popped up from a search on the Internet. It's from this blogpost:

Italians have a word dietrologia — literally translated as “behindology.” It’s the art of looking behind the surface of things to find their meanings, the hidden meanings of things. The Italian dictionary defines dietrologia as the “critical analysis of events in an effort to detect, behind the apparent causes, true and hidden designs.”

In an article in The Economist, in a column called "Johnson," we find a similar explanation:

SPEAKING with a veteran foreign correspondent last week I learned an Italian term I hadn't known: dietrologia. The idea is that many Italians believe that the surface or official explanation for something can rarely be the real one. There's always something behind, or dietro, that surface. It's a great word.

See this definition in Italian from Treccani (in Italian).

In a future lesson, we will look at more ordinary ways to use dietro. 

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