Last spring when I was traveling to Rome every week day to study Italian, I always stopped by a newsstand on Wednesday to pick up the latest copy of Internazionale.

As the website’s about page says:

Every week Internazionale publishes in Italian the best of the world’s press, covering politics, economics, culture, science, and technology. All the articles, chosen by a team of experts, appear unabridged from over 300 daily, weekly, and monthly publications.

The magazine offers a good amount of online content gratis.

It’s an excellent magazine.  Many of the articles are translated from English (Western) publications, but Internazionale also includes a good sampling from publications in other languages, which is a very good thing, I think. Not to mention, it’s a great and informative way to practice your Italian reading skills, if that’s your interest.

And, no, they’re not paying me to for this endorsement. It’s just one reader’s natural enthusiasm for a good thing found.

Benigni’s interviewer is Grace Russo Bullaro, a City University of New York professor.  Although the interview was in Italian, Bullaro translated it into English for the i-Italy website. The original Italian version is here on the Italian-language magazine OGGI 7 website (“Benigni poeta e la vita è più bella” July 16, 2008).

I’m a fan of Benigni’s and wrote another post about him a couple of years ago (“Roberto Benigni: Speaking in Second”). That post featured a 1998  interview Benigni did with the Guardian, and on that occasion he did the whole thing in English.

By the way, if you haven’t seen Benigni’s “The Tiger and the Snow,” I think you’ve missed one of his best works. As discussed in the interview with Bullaro, the movie bombed at the box office. Who knows why exactly, but a rash of lunk-headed reviews of the film at the time certainly didn’t help.

For a more favorable and informed review, see Deborah Young’s piece in Variety (“The Tiger and the Snow”/”La Tigre e la Neve“  Oct. 12, 2005).

And as one more plug for the film, here’s the trailer.

This was my comment to the worried face looking back at me from the bathroom mirror a couple of weeks ago, as I tried to ease a minor anxiety attack after laboring through a homework assignment.

But today in class, grazie a Dio, we’re enjoying a brief respite from wrestling with the criminally high number of verb forms in the Italian language. Today we’re being pummeled by the pronouns. As I sit around a conference-size table with a half dozen other students from various countries across the globe, I’m feeling more or less relaxed. Finally, it seems to me, I’m making some headway with the usually vertigo-inducing  pronouns.

Not so, however, for a couple of my co-students. They’re struggling and I recognize the symptoms — a kind of numbed mumbling coming from their dry lips as all they think they’ve learned about Italian to this point now whirls bumper-car crazy in their brains. Oh, I know this condition well. I’ve been there myself. And I’ve not a doubt in the world I’ll be there again.

So today for these two unfortunates, no matter how many times our teacher repeats the grammatical admonition that the second person singular (tu) in the imperative negative always is formed by placing non before the infinitive, they stare back at him through glazed eyes. And they repeat, ever again, the wrong conjugation. Eventually, they will get it, eventually it will click. But not today.