When you’ve been learning and speaking a language for a long time there are certain words and phrases that stick out and embed themselves in your everyday life. Italian is such a beautiful language, it just sounds so lovely and flows off the tongue so well, two of the reasons I wanted to learn it. For this blog post I’ve picked five Italian words/phrases that stand out for me.
Dear Italy,
I fell in love with you a long time ago, your food, your language, your cobbled streets, your rolling hills. I hated history at school yet I fell in love with yours. I never thought I wanted a foreign man, even after I had spent five months emersed in Italian culture, but you sent me one anyway. You changed my life for the better.
I wrote a little bit in my first #dolcevitabloggers post about my time doing Erasmus in Urbino. I travelled to quite a few places in Italy during the five months that I spent there but I would still say now that it remains my favourite city. I just loved the cobbled streets, the architecture and the amazing surrounding scenery of the Marche hills.
So when did my connection to Italy begin? Most people think it began when I met Matteo in 2003 but actually it was quite a bit before that. My first taste of Italy was as a teenager. We stayed in Sorrento and visited Pompei and Capri. Something about the people, the food and the language must have drawn me in as while I was doing my A levels I started teaching myself some language basics using an audio course.