Antonio is in Praia a Mare and talks to us about the cult of the Madonna della Grotta (Madonna of the Cave), patron saint of the city. The cult began in 1900, and every year in August the statue of the Madonna is carried in a procession, where many of the faithful take part.

Manuel is on the phone, being dunned, and he doesn’t know how repay his debts. Video provided by pa74music.

The Radici nel Cemento [Roots in Concrete] are an Italian reggae group from Fiumicino (Rome), who appeared on the Italian reggae scene in 1993. Alla rovescia [Upside-down] is the title song of the album released in 2001 and tells of a world that spins backwards. Everything is the opposite of the way it should be in real life.

Life is Beautiful is the 1997 dramatic comedy, directed by and starring Roberto Benigni. It received three Oscars. The film takes place in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. Guido (Benigni) in order to protect his son, pretends that the Jewish deportation and the war are just a game, with the final prize: a tank.

La Strada (The Road) is a 1954 film directed by Federico Fellini, with Anthony Quinn and Giulietta Masina. The film was partly shot at the famous Saltanò Circus, with actors and extras taken from that circus. Fellini changed the name of Anthony Quinn’s character from Saltanò into Zampanò, maybe for copyright reasons. The picture won an Oscar for best foreign film in 1957. It was the year the foreign prize was instituted and it allowed Fellini to break out from national boundaries.

The story of four young women, aged seventeen, who were born into upper middle class families in a provincial Italian city. Their perfect lives, their high profile families, their shopping, their sports activities, their boyfriends, and their exclusive parties are all a huge bore for them. Elena, the group’s leader, finds herself in a strange situation when their newly arrived teacher, Mario Landi, enters unknowingly into their adolescent games.

Lecce, in the 1990s. Ignazio is an esteemed judge who has recently returned to the city after working for many years in the north. He meets Lucia again, the woman he has secretly loved since childhood. The woman works as a perfumes representative, but this is just a front. In reality, Lucia has become the right hand woman of the boss Carmine Za, one of the heads of Sacra Corona Unita (United Sacred Heart), the new criminal organization that in 90s reached its apex of power and ferocity.

There is an amazing variety of fresh and dried pasta shapes and sizes in Italy, referred to as formati (shapes and sizes). Their names have to do with their surface (smooth, rough, grooved), their size, expressed with a suffix, such as -one, -etto, -ino, etc, and/or what they resemble. Marika makes some sense of the vast assortment of pasta found in Italian supermarkets.

There are different kinds of flour used to make pasta. "Flour" is a generic term but it's not always accurate. Marika explains it all.

During a walk in the country, Federico explains what summer is to his little brother Piggeldy.

Marika divides the types of pasta into different categories and explains their characteristics, ranging from ingredients to shelf life, to cooking time, and consistency.

Who doesn't love pasta? Marika talks about this extremely popular Italian food: the history, where it's produced, and how to cook it.

Here's more about the popular word pure. It can express encouragement, resignation, or be superfluous. Pure is often truncated to pur when it combines with other particles to mean something particular.

The word pure has several meanings, from "also" to "even," to "although." Marika explains them and gives us some examples in context.

"Manco" is a bit more complicated than "mica" because it's often used with irony. It's also used with the impersonal third person, making it rather tricky to translate. But remembering that it means neanche (not even) can help.