Awesome! Then you know exactly the pizza I am talking about :-) although my mother was from Trieste, and the pizza there was the same. So it must be an Italia-wide thing.
How did you know my mother was from Italy? No, I wish I spoke Italian but I am trying to learn. I am going to go visit family there soon, and I only have one cousin that speaks English. So I need to learn at least the basics. And I’m going to spend a lot of time alone in Venezia, although I’m sure most of the restaurant and hotel staff speak English. And plus as you said, it is such a beautiful language. For years in Mexifornia, I wanted nothing to do with anything that sounded like Spanish. But in comparison, Italian is much prettier.
So how is it that you speak Italian? Or write it :-)
I lived for a bunch of years in an Italian-American neighborhood where a lot of i vecchie (the old people) still spoke the language, and also traveled to Italy a number of times, top to bottom, side to side. In between trips, I took Italian lessons for several years. I had already studied several other languages, so that made it easier, but immersion in the culture is the best way to cement your learning.
See if you can find a class at a university, so that you will be forced to converse. Many have summer or night programs. Also, today there are those handy cellphone translation apps to use while traveling. Type in the English and show the Italian onscreen to the salesclerk, hotel manager, etc. One used to need a Europe-compatible phone, although tech may have improved since my last trip pre-9/11; and you probably still need a Europe-compatible charger.
I moved away from that neighborhood, sadly; but still try to keep up by looking at Italian newspapers online, seeing Italian-language films, etc.
Here is a fun site: Duolingo.com
And here is a pan-European news site in English: The Local, Italy edition