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Ho usato questo nastro per chiudere lo scatolone.

Ho usato questo nastro per chiudere lo scatolone.
I used this tape to close the large box.
From Lesson 153:Past agreement with 'ne' (ne ho presi)·Italian

Questions & Answers about Ho usato questo nastro per chiudere lo scatolone.

The word for box is usually scatola, so why does this sentence use scatolone?
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?
Because the exact object (questo nastro, meaning 'this tape') is explicitly stated. You use ne to replace a quantity, like saying 'I used some of it'. If you dropped 'this tape' and instead said 'I used some of it to close the large box', it would become: Ne ho usato per chiudere lo scatolone.

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