Merda!: The Real Italian You Were Never Taught in School

Rating:
Summary: excellent
Review: very funny & informative esp for a beginner like myself. I read it all the time.

Rating:
Summary: This book is not as good as others in the same series.
Review: Well, I already had "Mierda: The Real Spanish, etc.", so I decided to buy this one. Italian is my mother tongue, so I bought this book to give it to a friend of mine studying Italian. I had to change my mind. The book is plenty of primary-school-level mistakes that, if you are learning Italian, actually makes the book pretty confusing, and that however aren't acceptable in any instruction book, even though about "bad" words. The vocabulary also is very much "regional" (mainly based on the dialect spoken in Tuscany) and so some of the words won't be understood outside that area. It is a pity, because the book about Spanish is pretty good. The book requires to be thoroughly revised by someone with more familiarity with standard Italian to make it worth even its relatively cheap price.

Rating:
Summary: Spice it up
Review: You may or may not want to use some of these words when speaking Italian, but they can be definitely useful to understand.

As for the comment of the previous reader that Italian has been standardized (all that this means is that the same Italian is taught in schools throughout Italy) and that now there should be no more idioms from Napoli - the dialects are still alive and well and used by people in their own regions and so are "idiomatic expressions" in those dialects. If you speak standardized Italian in Calabria, they'll sure understand you, but you may not understand them if they choose to speak Calabrese among themselves.