Italian expression of the day: 'Ci siamo'

If you've ever agonised over your choice from an Italian menu (and who hasn't?), a waiter might have attempted to wrap things up by asking: Ci siamo?

The phrase can be either a question or a statement. Literally "here we are" or "are we there?" it's made up of the adverb ci (here/there) and the verb essere (to be).

As a question, it means anything from "Are you ready?" to "All good?" to "Do you understand everything I've just told you?"

When your waiter asks Ci siamo?, he's checking if you're ready to order. If a teacher breaks off mid-lesson to ask the class Ci siamo?, she's making sure everyone's still following.

You can also use it as a statement to signal you've reached a point of readiness or completion:

Ci siamo!

Here we are! / That's it! / All good!

Adesso ci siamo

Now we're getting somewhere / Now we're talking

Finalmente ci siamo!

We've made it at last!

If you're not quite ready:

Ci siamo quasi

We're almost there

This works whether you're almost at your destination, ready to leave the house, or coming to a final decision on whether to have the linguine or the tagliolini.

To fully understand the phrase though you'll need to get to grips with the small but sometimes frightening word ci.

Ci is one of Italian's hardest-working particles, and one of the pieces of grammar which language learners often find most confusng.

If you've heard that many Italians themselves struggle to explain how and when to use it, this is true.

For native Italian speakers, using ci is automatic. Lucky for them. But Italian language students have to think about it – or rather, ci devono pensare. Here ci means "about it," replacing a phrase like a questo (about this) when the context suggests we already know what the "it" or "this" is that we're thinking about.

There are plenty of other uses of ci, and we won't go into them all here.

But what you need to know is that in ci siamo, the ci is filling in for the word "here" or "there" (adverbs of place), similarly to the way it can fill in for "it" or "this" or "that".

Although don't forget that the place it's referring to is a metaphorical point of arrival or state, rather than a physical location.

Think of ci siamo as saying "we've arrived at this point" – whether that's a point of readiness ("Good to go"), completion ("All done"), understanding ("Got it"), or agreement ("We're on the same page").

Allora. Ci siamo?

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