Gomorrah TV series

Sky Atlantic is currently showing the TV series 'Gomorrah'. It's unremittingly bleak, full of unattractive characters in grim locations being beastly to one another. It is the perfect antidote to Hollywood's romanticised dramas about Italian organised crime. What I would like to know is whether it was shown in Italy with Italian subtitles. The Neapolitan dialect is mostly incomprehensible to me and my family originates from a part of Italy only 70 miles further north. How did Italians from Northern Italy cope?

Yes,i saw it here in central italy with italian subtitling although some bits remained comprehensible others were gibberish on the original sound track.great film,VERY disturbing and full of evil..

sebastiano wrote:Yes,i saw it here in central italy with italian subtitling although some bits remained comprehensible others were gibberish on the original sound track.great film,VERY disturbing and full of evil..

I suspected this was the case. But, as you say, great television.

Neil D wrote:The Neapolitan dialect is mostly incomprehensible to me and my family originates from a part of Italy only 70 miles further north.  How did Italians from Northern Italy cope?

To my shame I didn't know 'Gomorrah' was on - but I'll go looking for it now.

Incidentally some authorities suggest that the reason Italian troops were so inefficient in WW1 was because almost everyone spoke dialect so the officers couldn't communicate with the soldiers and the soldiers couldn't communicate with each other.

Did Italy get involved in WW1? (I'm just asking).

About dialect - where I live (Umbria) sometimes people (over forty) talk to me in dialect and can't do anything else. I've got used to this.

In Sicily and in Calabria (as a tourist) asking directions (and more) people under forty would switch into proper exquisite Italian when they twigged I was 'foreign'. It was quite remarkable - I thought I was in a Scottish environment where there was a stupendously wonderful education system.

It's so depressing that the youngsters in these depressed areas are capable of perfectly declining stuff beyond the passato remoto, but have no notion of how to say anything beyond "have a nice day" in English.

One of our neighbours speaks Tuscan with a very thick accent and I have to make a tremendous effort in order to understand him. Fortunately, his wife speaks a very clear Italian and she notices whenever I get "lost in translation".
I agree in that Italian students should be learning more foreign languages, particularly, with such a high unemployment amongst the young ones.

The Original Relaxed wrote:Did Italy get involved in WW1? (I'm just asking).

'Did Italy get involved in WW1?' Actually yes - and in a big way.

Can you imagine a cemetery with 100,000 Italian dead?  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-29190890

To complement Ghiro's post, Italy lost between 450,000 and 651,000 soldiers during WW1 and more than half a million civilians. This is why there are so many "caduti" monuments in even the smallest village. This tragedy also caused massive emigration of Italians, like in the case of Pope Francis' grandfather and prepared the way for Mussolini's dictatorship. Here is another interesting article http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-one/10562017/Melting-glaciers-in-northern-Italy-reveal-corpses-of-WW1-soldiers.html

Neil D wrote:.  The Neapolitan dialect is mostly incomprehensible to me and my family originates from a part of Italy only 70 miles further north.  How did Italians from Northern Italy cope?

Actually Neil, Neapolitan is more than a Dialect it's an entire separate language, as my OH who is a native Neapolitan constantly tells me, as they have different words and structure to Traditional Italian.

Your OH is absolutely right, Flip. Neapolitan is not an Italian dialect, but a language belonging to the Romance group of languages, derived from Vulgar Latin in the same way as Spanish, French, Catalonian, Romansch... or Italian... to name a few...

Neapolitan is and has always been a language.  Under the Romans, Naples was allowed to continue as a Greek city with its own laws and customs, so Neapolitan has the highest percentage of true ancient Greek words than any other language, including Sicilian which was much bastardised under the arabs and Normans.

Here is an interesting summary covering Romance Languages and their current status http://www.orbilat.com/General_Survey/List_of_Romance_Languages.html

Sorry to go off the theme but the southern fron t in WW1 had little to envy on the western front where british perception tells one was the" entire war".there were in fact 4.000.000 killed on the southern front where a poorly equipped and led italian army virtually alone if you exclude a very small british expedtionary force and american nurses (no troops) fought alone against German-austrian-hungarian troops in extreme conditions along the circle of the dolomites with great valor and final victory against overwhelming odds.