Learn Italian: Ho usato questo nastro per chiudere lo scatolone. - I used this tape to close the large box.

In Italian, you can add suffixes to words to change their size or feeling. Adding -one means large, so a scatola (box) becomes uno scatolone (large box). Notice that while scatola is feminine, the -one ending makes the new word masculine!

Why does the sentence use the article lo instead of il before scatolone?

Because scatolone starts with an s followed by another consonant (c). Masculine singular nouns starting with this combination always take the definite article lo instead of il.

Why do we use per before chiudere?

In Italian, when you want to say you did something 'in order to' do something else, you use per followed by the infinitive verb. Here, per chiudere translates to 'in order to close' or simply 'to close'.

Since this lesson is about the partitive pronoun ne, why isn't ne used in this sentence?