Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Naw, mon. It's Swiss.

Name that movie!

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Lugano, Switzerland.

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Even though I was there, taking these pictures, I still couldn't believe this place.

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It's unfair that one small town can contain so much beauty, when other places could benefit from a fraction of what Lugano has.

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Cecilia and I are in this one as proof that this isn't a digitally altered post card.

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The nice thing about this corner of Switzerland is that they primarily speak Italian. I've found another place in the world where I can use my hard earned Italian. It's actually easier here for me to speak and understand because the Swiss speak Italian without a "dialecto" that's as strong as anywhere else in Italy.

Did you know that about Italy?

In the States when we say people speak in dialect, it's English with a certain region's accent. We can still understand each other and basically speak the same language. In Italy, the children learn the dialect at home (where I live it's the Veneto dialect) and don't learn proper Italian until they go to school. Each dialect from each region in Italy is so different that someone from Sicily can't understand someone from Venice unless they switch to proper Italian. The proper Italian is what they taught me in my classes. So Italians all over Italy can understand me when I speak to them, but I have no idea what they are saying to me most of the time because they answer in the dialect. When the Lugano people answered me, I understood.

*cue angel chorus*

I only got to visit for an afternoon, so I don't have many stories, but Lugano kept a little piece of my heart. How could it not? I bet it already has a little piece of your heart now too.

1 comment:

You are a lovely person.