Study Italian in Florence
Monday, 23rd March 2009
Florence is just one of those cities. Paris, Barcelona, Venice, etc. You’ve just got to go there.
Talk to fellow travellers and you will hear the same words repeated, “amazing” and “incredible” riddle the conversations, and they are right, the steaks are delicious! Juicy, tender and cooked to perfection, mmm. But the best steak outside of Argentina isn’t the only reason to visit the Tuscan capital, believe it or not.
Florence is essentially an open-air museum and art gallery where you can walk in the footsteps of Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Boticelli so it’s no wonder that in the height of summer the place is heaving with tourists. But there is a reason why Florence is so full of Japanese desperate to take photos in front of the Ponte Vecchio and groups of Americans intently listening to their tour guide in the Uffizi. The culture. Florence has had a great effect on Western civilisation and evidence of this can be found all over the town. So much art was created here during the Renaissance that it seems to have literally exploded out of the Uffizi and littered the centro storico.
I visited Florence in March but I still heard as many American and English voices as I did Italian. But don’t let this put you off staying here. People today are always looking for the next new place to visit so they can smugly say that they’ve been to some unpronounceable village where life is so much more “real”. But what could be more real in Italy than walking in to a bar and asking for a “caffè”, picking up the “giornale” or chatting with the locals? Learning the local language of wherever you go is the best way to ensure that you not only can experience what it would be like to live in the country but also so you can be the smug one as you casually walk past countless confused tourists in any bar, restaurant or museum. Nowhere else is this kind of knowledge needed more than in Italy. If you can speak Italian then you can find out that cappuccino is actually only a breakfast drink, discover that the only way to get served in a bar is to walk past everyone else and just demand your drink instead of waiting politely at your table or learn that only foreigners ever tip in restaurants.
So why not put on your sunglasses, light up your cigarette and learn what it really means to be Italian.
More about Italian courses in Italy
Tags: english, italian, culture, learning, language, italy
Posted by Neil Stawarz under Experience Cultures,
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