Fig: time of youth or inexperience, any period in a person's life or career characterized by callowness and unsophistication

I know I did some very foolish things when I was young, but, as Shakespeare put it, these were "my salad days, when I was green in judgment"

Lo so che ho fatto delle cose stupide quando ero giovane, ma erano i miei anni verdi, quando ero ancora acerbo

What's striking, from an old-fashioned feminist perspective, is just how little has changed in the last 20 years. It's not that we were wrong back in the salad days of feminism about the existence of vital "feminine values." If anything, today women have more distinctive views as a sex than they did 20 years ago

Quello che colpisce, da un punto di vista femminista vecchia maniera, è quanto poco sia cambiato negli ultimi 20 anni. Non è che ci sbagliassimo negli anni verdi del femminismo circa l'esistenza di "valori femminili" vitali. Se non altro, oggi le donne hanno una visione molto più distinta, come sesso, di quanto non avessero 20 anni fa

This expression may have derived as an analogy between "green" - inexperienced, immature - and "salad greens", which are ideally both young and tender. In Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, the heroine refers to "My salad days, when I was green in judgement, cold in blood, to say as I said then"