Quite often, during my guided tours in Mantua, I describe the Italian Renaissance as a real "Game of Thrones": powerful families, ruling different lands, quite often fighting each other. The Houses Stark, Targaryen, Lannister, Baratheon, Tyrell and so on, are not so different from the Gonzaga, Este, Sforza, Medici, Borgia and many of the other Renaissance dynasties.
Working as a tour guide, I’ve noticed that there’s a word very difficult to be pronounced by the American clients: “grazie”, the Italian word for "thanks". The most of the time they pronounce it “grazi”, and sometimes, if they can speak Spanish, they try to go with “gracias”, or - in some rare occasions - I've even heard people gratefully saying "greasy", meaning "thanks". [...]
Dozens of stories go around about that couple of foreign visitors lost in Firenze, desperately looking for “Florence”. It’s an old joke, known in many different variants: sometimes they are in Venezia, looking for “Venice” or in Napoli, searching “Naples”. [...]
