You never know when you will be celebrating the new year with Italian friends. Here is some vocabulary that will be useful to you.

The next stop is Novara, a city near Milan, with an interesting history related to when it was under Spanish rule. See map. The video mentions a special sesini tax, and to learn more, check out this lesson.

This year's holiday greetings from the Yabla Italian team include a short poem by Gianni Rodari. He asks a soothsayer to see into the future. Let's see what the soothsayer says! Heartfelt thanks to all who are honing their Italian skills with Yabla.

How to exchange greetings at Christmastime? What is the Italian equivalent of Christmas cookies? Marika helps us out with some good words and expressions to know.

There are different reasons one chooses to walk a path. The important thing is to feel the need to undertake it. It's not like a stroll in the park, but rather a challenge to one's body, mind, and spirit.

While providing us with some Christmas vocabulary, Marika explains a bit about how Christmas works in Italy.

People who want a spiritual but active way to see Italy often choose la via francigena (the road from France), the Italian pilgrimage route from France to Rome that corresponds to the perhaps more famous "Camino de Santiago" from Paris to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

One way for Le Cinque Terre to accommodate refugees landing in Lampedusa has been to teach them how to build dry-stone walls. This is a much-needed skill in the area and therefore the project is an advantage all around.

Adverbs davanti and di fronte have to do with a position in relation to something or someone. In contrast, avanti [forward], discussed in part 1, is primarily about motion.

Le Cinque Terre — a place so many visitors from other countries put on their must-see lists — is the topic of this segment. It's a marvelous example of the relationship between humankind and nature.

Marika answers a question about some tricky adverbs of place: avanti, davanti, and difronte. She begins, in this segment, with avanti (forward), an adverb that is mostly used with verbs of motion, such as andare (to go) and venire (to come)

A quarryman has to have a passion for his work. Every block of marble is a challenge and has to be observed on all sides and many times to make sure it is good. But succeeding in cutting it and taking it out is an enormous satisfaction.

Vennai is the most important marble quarry in Carrara. Luigi Pasquale talks about when he started working there at about 14 years of age.

Marika finishes up with two more expressions related to seafaring. The first one is very similar in meaning to an expression Marika mentioned in an earlier video. Perhaps you will recognize it.

We visit the 28th chapel where the scene of Jesus before Pontius Pilate is depicted. We also learn a little secret about how these statues were created.