Speranza (spe-rahn-zah), what a beautiful word. It means  “hope” and  it comes from  the Latin  spes, a noun of the fifth declension, one that kids in school never managed to remember. 

Before being “speranza,” it was speme in Italian and, although the former entered our vocabulary sometimes around the  13th century, the latter would still appear here and there  in the written words of our poets.