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Malgrado il prato fradicio, il catering è andato bene.

Malgrado il prato fradicio, il catering è andato bene.
Despite the soaking wet lawn, the catering went well.
From Lesson 454:Concessive prepositions (nonostante / malgrado)·Italian

Questions & Answers about Malgrado il prato fradicio, il catering è andato bene.

Can I use nonostante instead of malgrado in this sentence?
Yes, malgrado and nonostante are completely interchangeable when followed by a noun phrase like il prato fradicio. Notice that neither of them requires an extra preposition to connect to the noun, unlike the English phrase 'in spite of' which requires 'of'.
Is fradicio just another word for wet?
It is much stronger than just wet (bagnato); it means completely soaked or drenched. You will often hear Italians combine both words as bagnato fradicio for emphasis (soaking wet), but as this sentence shows, fradicio works perfectly well on its own.
Since catering is an English word, how do we know it takes the masculine article il?
Foreign loanwords imported into Italian are almost always assigned the masculine gender by default, which is why it uses il. They are also invariable, meaning their endings do not change in the plural. If you were talking about multiple catering services, it would simply be i catering.
As a quick refresher, why is it è andato bene instead of ha andato bene?
The verb andare (to go) is a verb of motion and always takes essere as its auxiliary verb in compound tenses like the passato prossimo. Because it uses essere, the past participle must agree with the subject, ending in '-o' to match the masculine singular il catering.

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