Hopefully Italy, like all old cultures of the world, can resist the “modern” or “post-modern” (whatever that means) call for multiculturalism. What is featured in Italy, for the most part is the rich Italian culture.
There is the disturbing tendency to hear lots of English songs on radio and elsewhere. There are the odd MacDonalds, Doner Kebab, Chinese Restaurant, but they are lost, compared to the power of Italian culture, in architecture, in food, and in the people.
There are also foreign street vendors. I was most impressed with the Africans, who seem to speak the best Italian. I asked one how long he had been in Italy. “3 months”, he said, in Italian, and proceeded, without success, to try to sell me whatever toy or useless trinket he was peddling.
His Italian was not bad. I suggest that a linguistics student should do a study on the language skills, and learning process of different groups of foreign street vendors in Europe. We might all learn something.
