Appetizers

In English, a word that starts with “anti” usually refers to something that counteracts or blocks or even demolishes what follows, such as antifreeze or antibiotic or antimissile missile. It is the same in Italian, but the language also employs that prefix more peacefully, simply to signify what goes “before,” as in antipasti, because, as appetizers, you consume them before the pasto, the meal. Antipasti can be so—how else to put it?—so appetizing that, if one has indulged too well, and finds that they have occupied most of the room required to accommodate the principal courses to which they were meant to serve just as an introduction, one may feel that the other use of “anti” was indeed the one intended.