March 2020

Italy

7 IMPORTANT THINGS TO KNOW BEFORE MOVING TO ROME

Moving to Rome

Your lifetime dream is to move to Italy and you are opting for the capital? Here are some things you should know before moving to Rome. Cost of life, cleaning, strikes and "sampietrini" cobbles are part of the Roman routine. To make them easier to remember, a Roman hill was associated with each one of them. 1. Cost of life in Rome – Caelian hill Milan and Rome are the...

Cross-cultural awareness

IS SMILE CULTURE-RELATED?

Last week I was on a plane from Chisinau to Rome. A lady from Southern Italy said Eastern-European women were beautiful, but they never seemed to smile. They looked as if they had an icicle inside. This is a recurrent observation of westerners traveling east. It happens because our culture influences our way of smiling.   Why is smile culture-related? Smiling is one of the basic acts of non-verbal communication....