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Palazzo Madama"Ssi ssente che ssono piemontesse?"
This sentence made me and my mum (who was with me in Torino) laugh a lot during our stay in that city.
There is a comic show on the Italian TV, called Zelig, in which many artists play fun sketches. One of them, Franco Neri (from the Southern region of Calabria), embodies the typical Southern Italian who in the past decades emigrated to Torino (and to the North in general). He often makes comparisons between the way of life in the South, where people enjoy life and are very emotional and warm, and in the North, where people are rather moderated and cold. Franco always makes fun of his Piedmontese friend Pautasso.
Well, the two lines for which this artist is very known in Italy are "Franco, oh Franco" (it's how his relatives in Calabria call him) and the one I've written above.
Actually, I didn't know how to write it since the fun is that the sentence "Si sente che sono piemontese?" ("Does it sound clear I come from Piemonte?") is pronounced with a Southern accent. In Southern Italy, "s" between two vowels in pronounced somehow between "ss" and "zz" (phonetically /ts-ts/; it can be difficult for foreigners to pronounce it).
When we arrived in Torino, we didn't think that Franco's are everywhere in that city: in bars, in museums, in shops, while original local people have almost disappeared. My mum and I laughed and remembered this line when we heared Southern Italians everywhere, certainly not because we don't like our Southern compatriots; it is simply strange to found a city where original people are a very little minority.
