About

 

 

My name is Joe Nance and I’m a long time Italophile. I think that my love affair with Italy began when a former girlfriend gave me a copy of the Basics of Italian cooking by Marcella Hazan . I’ve always liked to cook (since I like to eat) and was amazed that you could make such good things with so few ingredients. One thing led to another and I began to learn some Italian. I’ve now made 7 trips to Italy and hope to make many more. I have taken up the study of Italian after a long lapse and am enjoying it immensely. So this blog is centered around the food, language and travel in Italy. Along with a few digressions of course.

A few words about the title of the blog “Dreaming In Italian”. I have often heard that having a dream in an acquired language is a sign of a reasonable level of fluency and certainly of a comfort level with the language. That is certainly my goal for learning the language. Of course the subtext of the dreaming is the general admiration for many Italian qualities; the relative level of spontaneity, the generally good food and the openness of so many of the people there.

2015 Update

Since the above description I have now taken an additional 6 trips to Italy that total almost exactly 52 weeks in all. Almost all of that time has been spent in Bologna. I have studied Italian there for an aggregate of about 6 months and, while not fluent, can have decent conversations and read reasonably well. I still have difficulty with movies and TV but can sometimes understand much of what is said on the radio. I have grown to truly love Bologna as you will find if you read my block over the last 4 years.

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