Profondissima

I am glad we are no longer talking about architectural details of a cathedral, or geological formations. It’s still on to more Italian things, but this time with a bit more colour and excitement.

We spent quite an amount of time talking about the Mafia and its origin, something Italy, especially Palermo (capital of Sicily) is known for. Of course we were thrown with some complex texts which embeds all the hierarchy of a mafia nucleus and we had to unravel that as part of our comprehension text.

Not to mention in addition to learning Italian we now have to learn quite a fair bit of the Sicilian dialect. The vocabulary is quite quaint, I must say.

Once, we had to watch the beginning of a famous movie (I Cento Passi - a real life story about a mafia’s son, Peppino, who renounced the mafia society and who paid the price for it by being assassinated), with the volume switched off. No, we were not learning how to lip read. The task was to figure out and discuss the subtlety of how the mafia behaves and thinks.

Then, we watch it again with the volume and on, and we discussed again, to see if our impressions have changed.

Before this, we had to listen to the cryptic dialogue of one of its middle segments (without the visual this time) and analyse the conversation between Peppino and his brother, and insert punctuations for the dialogue.

Today, we continued with the text and parts of the movie. This time we saw the actual visual of the dialogue we had listened the week before.

We also had to analyse the poem that Peppino has read aloud in the opening scene. It was a ‘’cheem’’ poem and we were struck silent. Profound silence! (It was ‘’profondissima’’ – a word used in the poem too!) Part of the difficulty arose from the vocab – if you do not understand certain key words, you will never understand the poem, no matter how you bluff your way through. The teacher did a great job explaining not just the literal meaning but the metaphorical sense, in her typical intense Italian way.

We just sat there, not able to react when she kept asking, ‘’Any comments? Any views?’’ For once even the chatter boxes in my class kept quiet.

‘’What happened to you all today? What’s wrong? Why so quiet?’’ my teacher kept asking. ‘’Are you all very sad that this is your last week and you have to leave your friends?’’ she continued.

In response, and to avoid complete silence, some of us said, ‘’si!’’