Sorry Joe
I guess that I started the non-English speaking on this thread. In my defense, I did translate. I try to practice my Italian as much as possible. Unfortunately, in the United States, that isn't possible because people speak a derivitive of Italian. It's not a knock on the New World dialect, I just don't understand it and I wish to speak the actual language (I was 41 years old when I found out that gabagool is really the Italian ham capicola) whenever I go there. If I want to speak actual Italian, I have to speak to my family or Albanians (most Albanians in the United States are fluent in Italian). When Americans of Italian desent go to Italy and try to speak Italian, very often they are asked to speak in English because Italians have no idea what they are asking/saying.
In fact, most Italian culture in the United States is very different from what exists in Italy. My wife pointed out that what her Italian upbringing is has nothing to do with what is on the other side of the Atlantic.
While what Alex is building can be found in similar fashion the United States, it's more the norm than the exception. Italy (I would speak for all of Europe, but I can provide evidence with Italy) has very unique cities and towns up and down the peninsula (you folks may have heard about a city called Venice - lol). It wasn't until recently that the South of Italy beame a bigger tourist attraction.
There is the town of Alberobello, in Puglia, where houses (called "Trulli") have been built in a modular fashion with conical roofs for hundreds of years, and people still live in them. There are other towns with similar artchitecture, but Alberobello is the main town for tourism.
The city of Ostuni, where my mother was born, is known as "La città bianca" or "The White City." I was told that during WW2, the mayor of Ostuni feared that the Allies would bomb his city and its residents to destruction. His plan was for everyone in the city to paint anything that could be seen from the air (roofs, streets, sidewalks, piazzas, etc.) white so that when Allied bombadiers looked through their scopes, they would mistake Ostuni for a cloud and fly past it. Another story attributes the city being painted white during a 17th century plague because people believed that people who lived in white houses were less likely to be sick (the whole white/purity thing).
My third example is the town of Matera in the region of Basilicata. You may have seen it in movies, often as the setting for Jerusalem, but recently in Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ." One of its famous residents is Cosimo Fusco - you might know him from the TV show Friends as Rachel's Italian boyfriend Paolo. What makes Matera unique is that from the outside, it looks like a typical hillside town. The hidden secret is that the visible adobe type structures that are visible only account for about 10% of the home. The rest of the homes are inside caves. These are referred to as "Sassi" homes. The government of Italy has recently been restoring the town (previously the Sassi houses were used for low income housing) for tourism and high end real estate sales.
I could go on and on about Italy, but I guess that you get the picture. Since this is a train forum, I will say that the railroad network is fast, clean, and pretty efficient (many Italians give those kudos to Mussolini). If I spent a year in Italy, I would not be able to see everything. Then when you expand it to a broader European scale, I could spend a lifetime and not see everything.
