Hello everyone! My name is Connor and I'm a 20 year old American passionate about everything
languages and travel. I've been studying Italian for the past four years and in that time have had
the chance to visit Italy twice. Today, I'm going to be talking about the biggest culture shocks
that I experienced on those trips. So without further ado, let's get started! The first big
culture shock that I experienced in Italy was the tremendous amount of regional differences
in the country. Normally, as Americans, when we think about Italy we think about stereotypes like
eating pizza and spaghetti, the mafia, and people being really loud and having big families.
In reality, a lot of these American stereotypes are more so stereotypes of southern Italy,
since the Italian South is where most of the Italian immigrants to America came from. If
you dive deeper into Italy, you'll find that there's tons of variety from region to region.
Taking food as an example, pizza is most closely associated with Naples,
while carbonara pasta is associated with Rome, and cannoli are associated with Sicily.
Funnily enough, Italians themselves stereotype people coming from other regions. For example,
Southern Italians might stereotype Northerners as being cold workaholics,
whereas Northern Italians may jokingly stereotype Southerners as being dishonest and lazy.
One YouTube channel that satirizes these Italian regional stereotypes is the Naples-based Casa
Surace, which I'd encourage you to go take a look at. The second biggest culture shock that
I experienced in Italy was the high quality of public transportation. In the United States,
outside of a few cities like Chicago or New York, public transportation is really lacking, and most
people have to rely on cars to get around. Pretty much all medium and large sized Italian cities
have bus systems to get from place to place within the city. When traveling from city to
city or region to region, there's tons of bus and train routes available. This makes it really easy
to plan out day trips when you're visiting Italy and see all the neighboring sites that you want
to see. But maybe the craziest thing about Italian transportation for Americans like me
is the fact that ride sharing apps like Uber and Lyft are rarely used. In Italy,
Uber only operates in a handful of cities, and furthermore,
due to Italian licensing regulations, Uber Black is the only type of service available.
This means that on the whole, taxis are still the cheapest and most readily available vehicle
for hire service. The next thing that shocked me about Italy was the driving. Normally in America,
we stereotype Italians as crazy drivers, and I found this to be absolutely true!
One time, I was in a friend's car in rural Puglia and nearly fainted when I watched him switch lanes
to speed past a van, avoiding a collision with oncoming traffic by not even a second.
if you're looking for a good way to learn Italian swear words, all you need to do is sit by a busy
intersection for 15 minutes and you'll hear every Italian swear word in the dictionary,
and then some. Another thing that shocked me about Italy is the prevalence of bottled water.
In America, if you go to a restaurant you'll be served free tap water. Not only is this
water free, but in most restaurants waiters will survey the room, looking for any glasses that are
not full to the brim with water, and then refill them with their pitchers. Now if you're anything
like me and sip water constantly whenever you go out to eat, this leads to an internal dilemma as
you wonder what to say to the waiter when they come to your table for the fifth time in 10
minutes to refill your water glass. In Italy, a restaurant would never serve you tap water,
or acqua del rubinetto as it's called, and will instead bring you glass bottles of water
for a couple euro a piece. You can either choose between aqua naturale, meaning mineral water,
or acqua frizzante, meaning sparkling water, depending on your tastes. For Americans,
dining at an Italian restaurant can feel expensive because of the couple euro charge you get every
time you order a glass bottle of water. But at the end, it usually ends up balancing out,
because in Italy you have to remember that there's almost never a tip. Outside of restaurants,
many Italian families even buy two liter water bottles for their homes and drink those instead of
using the tap. While it was pretty easy for me to adjust to using glass bottles at restaurants, as
an environmentalist it was always hard to adjust to using plastic bottles at people's houses.
The next culture shock that I experienced in Italy was the price of cellular data.
On my second trip to Italy, I went to a cell store because I needed to get a prepaid sim
for my phone. I walked in fully expecting to pay a fortune, but the shopkeeper told me
that it'd only cost me about 20 euro for 40 gigs of data. I was completely astonished,
because in America we're used to paying astronomical prices for our cellular service.
I later learned that Italy is one of the cheapest countries in the world for mobile data,
according to the Visual Capitalist. One gig of data in Italy averages to be about 43 cents,
making it the fourth cheapest country in the world.
Another thing that shocked me about Italy was how strange the bathrooms can be.
During my first trip to Italy, I was eating at a restaurant near the Trevi fountain
and decided I need to go to the bathroom. So, I went up to the owner of the restaurant and asked
her where it was, and she pointed towards the door in the back. I walked over, opened the door,
and then completely freaked out when I saw an old Italian woman washing her hands in the sink!
I returned to the owner, asked her if that was in fact the men's bathroom, and she looked at me like
I was stupid! So, after I saw the old woman leave, I went back into the bathroom for a second time.
Looking around, I was surprised to see a men's toilet locked behind a door to the left
and a woman's toilet locked behind a door to the right--something I'd never seen before in America.
Another thing that really shocked me in Italy was actually the vending machines. There were vending
machines everywhere selling snacks, beverages, coffee, condoms, and more. In some urban areas,
you can find automated vending shops made up completely of vending machines. I even saw some
vending machines selling cigarettes and beer! These vending machines required you to input
an ID to verify that you're of legal drinking age, although I'd question how effective that
method was, since on numerous occasions I saw kids that look no older than 13 years old using them.
And that leads me into my next culture shock: the Italian drinking culture. In Italy, the drinking
age is 16 for beer and wine and 18 for liquor. In reality though, these rules are not strictly
enforced and it's common for bars and stores to not even check IDs. Overall, Italians have
a much healthier relationship with alcohol. Wine is an essential part of Italian cuisine, but yet
binge drinking is completely frowned upon. All right guys, that wraps up for today's video!
Thank you for watching and let me know in the comments what are some of the culture shocks that
you've experienced in your own life. Don't forget to subscribe and click on the notification bell so
that you don't miss any videos about language and travel. Thanks again and see you soon!