Italy is a country where beauty is common. In the landscape, in art and, of course, in its language. Italian isn’t known as la bella lingua, the beautiful language, for no reason. However, Italian has been going through some difficult times, both in Italy and in the US.

Languages, all of them, are living constructs: they change and evolve in their structures, lexicon and phonetics through time. Italian became Italian from Latin, through a variety of stages. English began as a German-sounding idiom, with declensions just like Latin and Greek and letters that no longer exist. Both, of course, are still changing.