After the war came TV. It changed everything, and provided a new way to unify the Italian language and teach people reading and writing.

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.”

It's time to talk about Calabria, a southern region with both sea and mountains. Let's hope Anna did some studying.

Pythagoras, after leaving Croton, brought his school of philosophy to Metapontum. This key city of Magna Graecia [Greater Greece] brings the series on Basilicata to a close.

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.

The segment concentrates on the environs of Matera, its rugged beauty, and the sacred art and architecture that makes use of natural grottoes.

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.

Adriano visits a Palermo antique dealer, Massimo Sgroi, who also exhibits the work of contemporary artists. Sgroi invites Yabla friends to submit work.

The segment features Acerenza and its 11th century cathedral, which was built over pagan and Early Christian constructions.

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.

The Archeological Park of Venosa is the highlight of this segment. We see the building projects of Robert Guiscard, the Norman conqueror of southern Italy and Sicily.

Soon after the introduction of talkies, dubbing came about in the thirties. Dubbing was extremely popular in Italy and remains so today.

This segment features Melfi, a city at the base of Mount Vulture, where Frederick the Second of Swabia spent a number of years.

Vittorio Umiltà Anzen was a lawyer who passed away in 2012. He loved Palermo and was proud of his house, which he shows us complete with private chapel and rooftop garden.

Anna gets grilled on Sicily by Marika. Oral quizzes are very frequently used in Italian schools. Grading is done on a scale from 1-10 for primary and secondary schools, and from 1-30 at the university level.

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.

Welcome to breathtakingly beautiful Basilicata with its mountains and sea, light and silence.

A visit to a sumptuous palace in Palermo which incorporates a variety of styles, from the Gothic to the Baroque.

We can see that the battle against using "Lei," the common, formal, second-person form of address, was taken very seriously by the fascists. In fact they went too far when it came to a popular women's magazine called "Lei" (she, her).

Mussolini continues to get rid of any traces of foreign words, and even mounts an exhibit against the use of the common formal second person singular address "Lei" (you) in favor of "Voi." See this lesson about "Voi" to get some background.

A great deal of effort went into purging foreign words from the Italian language under the fascist regime. Newspapers, magazines, and book publishers were at the forefront of the effort and were tasked with finding Italian replacements for foreign words and expressions. Many fascist-era terms have fallen by the wayside, but some succeeded and are still in use today. As an example, the word manifesto [poster] was successfully introduced to replace the French term affiche.

Here we go with a new series with Anna and Marika. Each video will feature an oral quiz — just like in actual Italian schools — about a region of Italy. A separate cooking video will feature a recipe from that region. We start in the "heel of the boot": Puglia.

The segment looks at how Mussolini patterned his fiercely nationalist rhetoric after poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, while harkening back to the glory of Imperial Rome. The song in the segment refers to Balilla, an 18th century Genoese boy. In 1746, Balilla threw a stone at an Austrian official of the occupying Hapsburg Empire, which led to the War of the Austrian Succession.

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.