Having recently found myself at a dinner table in Italy with Americans, I find the following article on “The America manual“, for Americans in Italy, quite interesting.
It’s all about trying to deal with conversations about your native country (in this case, America), with a foreigner (in this case, Italian) who purports to know more than you do.
I don’t believe this is exclusively an Italian trait, but I do agree it’s highly frustrating when people tell you about your own country.
Anyway, the author has decided to use a “yes, and…” theory to converse when an Italian insists that America is either a worse country, or that he knows more than you do.
The conversation would go something like this:
