There will be no more shoulder shrugging when tourists ask directions in the Umbrian town of Spoleto: officials have decided it’s about time locals here learned English.

Though known for hosting the international Festival of Dei Due Mondi, the locale of 38,000 could use a language boost, according to the city culture councilman.

The answer? A program called “I Speak Spoleto” featuring American movies. A square in the town center hosts free outdoor flicks until mid-September. It’s the first in an ongoing series of language programs for business people, the police department, administrators and everyone else.

The ambassadors of English-language culture include: “Grease,” “Saturday Night Fever” and the “Blues Brothers.” These old faves will seem new to Italians watching them in English for the first time — at least in the case of “Grease,” the songs were translated in italiano, too.

It’s a timely idea: Italians aren’t the most linguistically agile in the EU when it comes to English, under 30% have any knowledge of it and 60% aren’t able to hold a conversation in English. Giuseppe Roma, head of the national census bureau, Censis, recently called it a “sad situation,” adding that languages aren’t taught well in Italy.

So kudos to Spoleto for trying out something new and fun, but one wonders, however, just how much help the French accents will be in “Ratatouille,” the film showing as part of the English for kids program.
Image courtesy @Nina.

More from the archives:
That’s amore: Italy’s favorite word
Italians Fight Flood of English Words
40% of Italian Words “Extinct”
Kids to Adults: Please Use Better Italian

Italian home design company Seletti created hipster smog masks for urban cyclists with skull and cross bones or check prints.

Retailing for €7 (about $11), the Urban Mask has an “active carbon filtering system” which can remove ozone
but can’t do much to cut through the fug of a million belching Fiats.

Though the use of masks is debatable, at least this one looks cool, and who knows whether spotting this kind of warning symbol in the rear view mirror while stuck in traffic might lead car drivers in Italy’s fashion capital — one of the world’s most polluted cities — to think twice.

The drug of choice for young, club going Italians: psychedelic mushrooms dissolved in Nutella.

Found under cow patties in mountains near work-hard, play-hard Milan, these red, polka-dotted Amanita muscaria shrooms are plentiful. Dealers mix about 10 of the fungus in a jar of jam or the famously addictive hazelnut spread Italians consider a national treasure.

“We older consumers have eaten these mushrooms for ages, thanks to the hippies who passed down the knowledge. Nowadays mixed in with sweet stuff, the young kids go for it too,” said “Mauro” a drug dealer/factory worker interviewed in leading daily Corriere della Sera.

Though possession and sale of the mushrooms is illegal in Italy, business is booming. A jar of the psychedelic snack goes for 16€ (about $25).

Popularity of the DIY hallucinogens has increased thanks to stricter controls on discotequers drugs of choice like ecstasy, said Francesca Assisi, a toxicologist who also recently published a book outlining all the species of hallucinogenic mushrooms in the Lombardy region.

It’ll be hard to think of those famed after-school Nutella parties the same way ever again.

Historic Italian outdoor firm Ferrino concocted a travel kit for pilgrims hoofing the thousand-year-old Way of St. James to Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

It comes with a super light, feature-happy backpack, waterproof map holder and lightweight sleeping bag sure to come in handy on those long, cold nights; the whole shebang costing a parsimonious €99 euros. A few friends have trekked from Milan to Northern Spain, returning with sore shoulders and mostly horror stories. Hmm. The combo would probably also come in handy for the slightly less ambitious Francigena pilgrim trail in Italy.
Image courtesy Ferrino.

If, as some scientists claim, 80 percent of taste is linked to smell, you’d better follow your nose to Europe this month. New York Times perfume critic Chandler Burr leads a series of scent dinners in Rome and Florence, curated by Context Travel (who insist on calling their scholarly guides “docents”), the evenings are part lecture, part feast and part exploratory scratch-n-sniff.

On June 10, you can sample the pantry perfumes in Rome at Casa Bleve, nestled into the ancient bath complex built by Marcus Agrippa. Another dinner will be held in Florence on June 11 at the new Four Seasons residence club Palazzo Tornabuoni, where the fabled Medicis broke bread in the 15th century.
Full story by Nicole Martinelli at Globorati.

Cell phones will now tell Italians when the tide is high in Venice. The city government just launched a free text message alert system for the floods which frequently put La Serenissima under several feet of water.

Intended to assist waterlogged locals, the only real requirement for signing up is an Italian cell phone. These timely texts could save a lot of headaches for anyone traveling to the city, especially in the fall flood season, normally a great time to visit Venice since it’s less plagued by tourists.

These acqua alta alerts let users know up to 36 hours before floods hit, keeps them posted from three to six hours before storms and lets them know when things are clearing up and water is ebbing back into canals.

Given that there are far more cell phone subscriptions than Italians, it is one of those services whose time has long come.

Chalk up another one for that particular brand of Italian genius: students have designed T-shirts bearing formulas and tricky grammar rules to get through high school finals.

Web site “scuola zoo” (zoo school) is giving away 10,000 T-shirt cheat sheets, available in six different styles; nail-biting students need only pay shipping costs. Creators Paolo and Francesco claim that fashion smarties won’t be stripped of this helpful accessory during tests.

In Italy, the comprehensive exams required for a diploma following five years of high school are the stuff of nightmares. Called “maturità” (lit. maturity) they are a rite of passage most recall vividly. With the advent of cell phones, many overtaxed students are trying to get high-tech help.

T-shirt info, including math, Greek and Latin head scratchers, is printed upside down for easy reading for the wearer, but also bears right side up info on the back — to help out fellow test takers.

The motto for the shirts is: “What’s not ingrained in your brain is printed on the T-shirt.”

Image courtesy Scuola Zoo.