WWOOF Italy Rule #3: Don’t strain too hard if all of your Italian lessons don’t seem to have quite prepared you.

Learning Italian, in Italy, is quite difficult, actually. In fact, going to some parts of Italy—especially the rural areas where WWOOF farms are to be found—to learn Italian can be like going to France to learn Portuguese. Why? According to my fellow WWOOFer Sergio, linguists recognize nine languages in Italy. Mussolini called them “dialects” of Italian in order to unite the country and the concept has stuck, but in reality modern-day Italian is one of nine languages that developed from Latin, chosen as the national language in large part thanks to Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy. That is to say, the others did not evolve from Italian, but evolved from Latin on a different trajectory than modern Italian. That is to say, the Tuscan dialect is to the Neapolitan dialect more or less as Portuguese is to the Neapolitan dialect.

Within those nine separate languages of Italy, then, are hundreds of different dialects. Phew! So perhaps I can take a little of the blame off my shoulders for not having learned more than I did while living 10 months in the Cilento: I was studying one written language and hearing another spoken language, entirely. It makes equal sense that in this mountain village with identity strongly tied to land, culture, and language, I understand significantly less than I did, for example, in Rome.