piangere sul latte versato

Literally: To cry over spilled milk

Example: “Il treno è partito: inutile piangere sul latte versato.” — The train has gone; there's no point crying over spilled milk.

English equivalent: To cry over spilled milk

Origin: Rooted in a genuinely rural, pre-industrial reality: milk was a comparatively rare, valuable, and perishable food before industrial production and refrigeration made it common, so spilling any of it represented a real, unrecoverable loss rather than a trivial inconvenience. The instinct to cry over it was understandable, but the tears changed nothing — the milk was already gone, and grieving over it accomplished nothing further. Aesop is credited with a related fable about a milkmaid who, distracted by daydreaming about all the things she'd buy with the money from selling her milk, trips and spills the entire pail before she's sold a drop of it — a story emphasizing the same lesson about wasted energy spent on what's already lost, or on what was never guaranteed in the first place. The nearly identical English idiom, "don't cry over spilled milk," documented from at least the 1600s, points to just how universally this exact rural experience was shared across European agricultural societies.