Difficulty: Adv-Intermediate
Italy
This documentary is about 2 brothers — the Taviani brothers — who are famous for having made many award-winning Italian movies. The short clips from their films will surely entice us to see the complete movies in the original Italian. Perhaps the most famous one is La Notte di San Lorenzo from 1982, whose English language release had the title: The Night of the Shooting Stars.
Difficulty: Adv-Intermediate
Italy
The narrator goes over the vanishingly small number of expressions coined during Mussolini's time that are still in use today. The song that gives the series its name is provided in full.
Difficulty: Adv-Intermediate
Italy
After the war came TV. It changed everything, and provided a new way to unify the Italian language and teach people reading and writing.
Difficulty: Adv-Intermediate
Italy
The segment looks at the Royal Academy of Italy's dictionary of Italian, which was filled with quotes from Mussolini. By the end of World War II, the dictionary had gotten to the letter “C.”
Difficulty: Adv-Intermediate
Italy
Mussolini inveighs against the middle class, saying that it is the enemy of fascism. Much of the footage in this segment features EUR, the Rome district that was built in the 30s and 40s.
Difficulty: Adv-Intermediate
Italy
This segment opens with a sort of poem, demonstrating how kids growing up in fascist Italy were expected to behave. Minority groups had a pretty hard time, too.
Difficulty: Adv-Intermediate
Italy
Schools in fascist Italy banned the study of dialects and moved to using standardized textbooks. The fascist hymn “Viva Adua nostra” refers to a battle won by the Kingdom of Italy in 1896 near Adwa, Ethiopia.
Difficulty: Adv-Intermediate
Italy
Soon after the introduction of talkies, dubbing came about in the thirties. Dubbing was extremely popular in Italy and remains so today.
Difficulty: Adv-Intermediate
Italy
The nineteen twenties ushered in sound in cinema. Italy's L.U.C.E. [L'Unione Cinematografica Educativa or Educational Film Union] was founded in 1924 and generated the fascist regime's cinematic propaganda.
Difficulty: Adv-Intermediate
Italy
In World War I, Italians who up until then had spoken their regional dialects, found themselves fighting side by side against a common enemy. But Mussolini was interested in fighting the internal enemy.
Difficulty: Adv-Intermediate
Italy
The documentary comes to a close with an interview regarding a prison cell used during the Inquisition. The cell bears the graffiti of its inmates. Pitrè had laboriously uncovered the graffiti, but it was only rediscovered in the 1970s by the writer Leonardo Sciascia and the interviewee in this segment, Giuseppe Quatriglio, who used Pitrè's writing to find it.
Difficulty: Adv-Intermediate
Italy
A Palermo doctor discusses the Integration of immigrants in Sicily and highlights the successes in healthcare. Medical assistance is provided for all immigrants, whether lawful or not.
Difficulty: Adv-Intermediate
Italy Sicilian
A Palermo doctor is interviewed about his practice and the African and Southeast Asian immigrant patients that he treats.
Difficulty: Adv-Intermediate
Italy Sicilian
Palermo faces the sea and has a very long history of immigration. The narrator interviews a young woman whose great grandfather came to Sicily from Sudan. She is involved in educating immigrants from Africa and Asia. Pitrè was also highly involved in education.
Difficulty: Adv-Intermediate
Italy Sicilian
Giuseppe Pitrè loved attending performances of chivalric folk plays in Palermo. This segment follows a marionette player at Palermo's Opera dei Pupi, the same theater where Pitrè went to see folk epics.
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