If you’ve ever travelled to Italy, you’ll have lots of great memories of your trip, I’m sure.
But maybe some bad ones, too.
For example, it’s not unheard of for visitors to have their pockets picked, their bags snatched, or be conned into buying fake designer goods.
Enter today’s free Italian listening comprehension exercise!
Turns out that unscrupulous Italians have been making a living by fleecing tourists since the days of Ancient Rome!
Who’d have imagined?
Click here to listen to the latest in our series of B1 (intermediate) listening comprehension exercises.
This is what you have to do:
- listen, while pondering the task
- listen again, trying a second time to complete the questions
- scroll down the page and listen a third time, while following the transcript
- use the transcript to check your answers
For more free material for learning Italian, follow these links:
Today’s exercise | Other’s in the current series | All levels
P.S.
News from our ‘Italian easy readers‘ department!
This week Natalia and I got two ‘first drafts’ from a pair of Italian teachers who approached us a while back wanting to write material for you.
The first was a love story set in a supermarket, of all places. Very original, very entertaining.
The second, a witness to a murder tells his story to a police inspector…
Both are excellent! I am SO looking forward to publishing them!
But these things take time. There’s some editing to do, then the cover design, and finally the audio recording and other technical bits and pieces.
Hopefully, though, that won’t take too long, and in the meantime, we have the next story from Enrico Maso to look forward to.
Enrico is author of ‘Ciak si gira‘, which I thought was great. His next ‘easy reader’ is called ‘La montagna’ and is about a group of friends who take a trip into the wild…
Also coming soon is the latest in our ‘book of the film’ series, written by Giovanni Galavotti, who is one of our online Italian teachers but also a movie scriptwriter, and so a real expert on the cinema!
If you liked Giovanni’s ‘Il sorpasso‘, ‘Divorzio all’italiana‘, or even ‘La dolce vita‘, then you should get off on our ‘easy’ version of ‘Ladri di biciclette’ (see the Wikipedia entry here).
‘Ladri di biciclette’ is one of the most depressing, but memorable, films I have seen in my whole life. Giovanni’s text does absolute justice to it, too. I saw the movie just once, fifteen years ago, but reading through the first draft of the easy reader brought it all back to me!
As Wikipedia puts it:
È tuttora considerato un classico del cinema ed è ritenuto uno dei massimi capolavori del neorealismocinematografico italiano.
That’s all the news for now. You’ll agree, there’s lots to look forward to!
(In the meantime, though, follow these links to browse the easy Italian readers and ebooks in our shop.)