Colin Rafferty <craffert(a)ms.com&gt; writes: I am fairly sure it means "It is the drop[let] that makes the bucket overflow". (I am not sure about "bucket" (it could be "vase"), but that is what it says in the equivalent Dutch saying). Funnily enough I found that mostly by translating the grammatical structure of the sentence and using context. I don't know any of the words except "una" and "il". I guess that is why machine translation has a long way to go yet. Jan P.S. Given the fact the saying exists in Italian and in Dutch, I would assume something close to it would exists in English too but I don't have a good dictionary handy.