Housework and Babysitting Italian Style

Need your villa cleaned or someone to watch your kids? How about a live-in to cook or babysit? From the Yahoo! Groups Italian comes this clarification about terms for domestic help:

Colf is a contraction for col(laboratrice) f(amiliare) and is the politically correct term for what used to be called donna di servizio - the housekeeper.

A badante is a caregiver, someone who is paid to look after elderly people or children (from the verb badare, to look after).

An au pair is translated as ragazza alla pari, and a nanny is a bambinaia.