There’s a certain shrug Italians do. A half-defeated, half-practical motion that says, “What do you want me to do about it?” Ask anyone in Italy why the average salary seems nailed to the floor, and you’ll probably get a variation of that shrug, maybe paired with a sigh, maybe a joke, maybe a deeply uncomfortable …
Continue reading “Why are Italian salaries so low? It’s not just the economy”
[…] the British do not have a term for a “colpo d’aria”. It literally translates as a “hit of air” and seems to be incredibly dangerous for Italians. They can get one in their eye, their ear, their head or any part of their abdomen. — BBC Magazine, 2011 If you’ve ever spent some time …
Continue reading ““Hit by air”: the Italian fear of breeze, explained”
We, Ferrari fans, are masochists. There’s no other way to put it. Season after season, we ride a rollercoaster of hope, heartbreak, and—occasionally—a glimmer of something resembling victory. And yet, we remain. For anyone outside this bizarre cult of devotion, it makes no sense. Why, in an era of Red Bull dominance, right after Mercedes …
Education tends to reveal more than it intends. Behind every subject and syllabus, behind every reform or ministerial decree, there’s a confession: this is what we think the future looks like. Or—more poignantly—what we hope it resembles. In Italy, that confession once had a distinctly glossy look. At the turn of the millennium, Silvio Berlusconi …
In recent years, Italians have unwittingly embraced a curious linguistic phenomenon: the adoption of “fake English” words. These are words that sound like English but either don’t exist in the English-speaking world or take on a meaning in Italian that’s quite different from their English counterpart. A recent Financial Times article explored this quirky trend, …
Continue reading “The Italians and the “Smart Working” trap”
