Time to unsubscribe from OnlineItalianClub.com??

Buondì.

On Friday we’ll be starting our ‘Spring Sale’, which means saving 20% on online Italian lessons, ebooks for learning Italian, blah, blah, and blah.

But enough of the marketing! There’ll be plenty of that, for those who can’t resist a bargain or need something to do during their lockdown/quarantine, in the articles our system will be emailing out from Friday 10th March to Sunday 29th March.

But for the rest of you? The vast majority of club members (perhaps two-thirds) don’t even open the emails they receive.

Perhaps twenty-five to thirty percent of you are, to some degreee, interested enough to click, then hopefully read, even if (Anne in Chicago) it’s only to search out errors of spelling, grammar or style to gleefully inform me of.

Today’s article, then, is for the people who probably won’t read it. It’s not good to bother people with marketing stuff if they’re not interested, right?

It’s also counter-productive, as there’s the risk our ‘content’ will be reported as spam multiple times across all five continents, meaning that Google will start to treat it as spam, which means that those who do want to see it will find it harder to do so.

OK then, people who aren’t interested in ANYTHING from us, what you should do is read to the end of this sentence, then follow its instructions – scroll down to the bottom of the email and click on ‘Unsubscribe’, which is on the very last line, on the left, (and yes I know this sentence is getting unwieldy), at which point you will see, in a separate browser window, a screen entitled ‘Subscriber Information’, where you should, please, click on the ‘radio button’ under the word ‘Unsubscribed’, to the left of where it says ‘List Name’ ‘italianclub’, and then (you’re virtually done, I promise) scroll down to the bottom right and click the grey ‘Save My Subscriber Settings’ button.

There! No more drivel from Daniel, but if you just read that, you either like my writing, hate it but enjoy searching for spelling and grammar errors, or aren’t paying attention. If it’s the latter, stop messing around: scroll down immediately and ‘unsubscribe’!

OK, don’t want to ‘ubsubscribe’? Then a less drastic alternative would be to just stop reading emails from the club from today until Sunday 29th of March. That way you’ll miss me trying to convince you to try online Italian lessons with a club teacher, read original and entertaining stories in Italian, etc. Actually, you should do these things, but hey, I’m not your mom. Your bad.

Così. There’s a sale coming! Unsubscribe quickly to avoid it, or do a Rip Van Winkle for a couple of weeks (the Spring Sale aside, that’s not actually a bad idea…)

Still reading? Excellent!

Then here’s a reminder of what we all have to look forward to once the bills are paid: in April, we’ll be doing our first ever Book Club. Some of you, I suspect a mix of the erudite, the bored, and the easily-lead, will be reading Umberto Ecco’s ‘Il nome della rosa’ with me, in the original Italian!

Simeon has already started, which I’ve been resisting doing myself, and has this to say:

Quick feedback on Il Nome della Rosa. I am up to page 70. The foreword (a pastiche of essays by Borges ?) and the first four pages (medieval European history) were slightly difficult terrain. But thereafter it is all straightforward; and if you are prepared to read through the odd word you don’t recognise, it is actually a reasonably quick read — and enjoyable. I say this as probably a B2/C1 student.

So there, perhaps it’s not a suicide mission (as some club members have suggested) after all? There’s still time to search out a copy, if you’d like to join us, though it seems Amazon has become a toilet paper wholesaler these days, rather than a bookseller.

If you can’t get hold of the Italian original, or if the material is genuinely too hard for you (though personally I think anyone should be able to read Italian, given suitable reading strategies and a bit of grit), not to worry.

Our regular ebook writer, Francesca, has prepared a short summary of the story (our usual ebook format – eight short chapters), which will help the not-actually-reading-the-book-Book-Clubbers to follow what’s going on and join the speculation regarding whodunit and, crucially, why.

For copyright reasons we won’t be able to sell our totally-unauthorised simplfied-for-learners version, but I daresay I’ll find a way to make it temporarily available for those who might benefit from it, obviously with the intent that they should buy an official copy and so appropriately reward the rights-holders.

After the Book Club, in the summer, look forward to our ‘History of Rome’ series. You’ll never understand modern Italy, and Italians, if you’re missing the deep backround, right?

Each week over the summer, I’ll be publishing three chapters of for-learners, written-in-Italian, Roman history. The material will be entirely free and will lead you by the hand from the misty origins of the settlement on the hills by the Tiber to (I think) the end of the Holy Roman Empire (the fall of Constantinople to the dastardly Turks) more than a millennium and a half later.

Bene. Hope that whets your appetite!

A venerdì, allora.

P.S.

For anyone who has just joined us and might be wondering, “where are the three, free Italian exercises a week you promised me?”, the answer is that, besides the ‘coming soon’ stuff described above, there’s a mass of free material on the club website and also on our easy Italian news site, both of which can be used by anyone without ‘joining’ our club, without having to read emails like this one (though well done for getting this far!), and without payment.

Go explore.