If you’ve ever befriended a prankster, you learn to start questioning suspicious claims or invitations to improbable-sounding events. Non ci casco, you say to yourself: I’m not falling for that.

It’s from the prepositional verb cascarci, or to fall for something. That’s not ‘fall for’ in a romantic sense – it means to get taken in by someone, to be hoodwinked.

Ci is a handy preposition that can stand in for words like ‘there’ and ‘it’, and in this context means ‘for it’. Cascare literally means ‘to fall’ (you might recognise it from the word cascata, which means waterfall) – so it’s one of those phrases that translates pretty cleanly into English.

Ci caschi ogni volta, amico mio.
You fall for it every time, my friend.

Tu sei l’ultima persona al mondo che pensavo potesse cascarci.
You’re the last person in the word I thought would fall for that.

Non ci cascare, è una trappola!
Don’t fall for it, it’s a trap!

It’s a verb that takes essere rather than avere, so remember to use the right auxiliary verb and to agree with the sentence subject when using the phrase in the perfect tense.

Questo era il loro piano e voi due ci siete cascati.
This was their plan, and you two fell for it.

Cascare isn’t the only or even the most widely used Italian verb for ‘to fall’ – that would be cadere. Cascare comes from Tuscan dialect and is a bit more informal and expressive than cadere, and is more commonly used in metaphors and turns of phrase.

Both cadere and cascare, for example, can be used to mean ‘fall over’:

È cascato per le scale.
He fell on the stairs.

Sono caduta dalla bicicletta.
I fell off my bike.

But only cascare can mean to ‘fall for’ a trick.

One other verb that can be used to talk about falling for something is abboccare: to bite. When used in a literal sense it usually refers to fish ‘taking the bait’, and it means the same in a figurative sense when applied to people.

Sembra che Laura abbia abboccato.
It looks as though Laura’s taken the bait.

Va bene, abbocco.
OK, I’ll bite.

Ora vediamo se abbocca.
Now let’s see if he takes the bait.

Now that you know these phrases, hopefully you can avoid getting taken in the next time you receive an offer that seems too good to be true – at least if it’s in Italian.

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