This article, written by  AMANDA COLETTA, appears on Foreign Policy.

Matteo Renzi passed the “Jobs Act” and mothers are taking their bambini to “baby parking.” But Italians are finally saying basta to the world’s lingua franca.

In the 1989 Italian satire Palombella Rossa, Nanni Moretti — an actor and director often described as Italy’s Woody Allen — plays Michele Apicella, a young politician who suffers amnesia after a car accident. He regains consciousness only to find that he doesn’t understand the world, or his own place in it.

Midway through the film — and midway through Michele’s emotional breakdown — he is besieged by a journalist, who insists on peppering her Italian with non-Italian words as a badge of her sophistication. “Il mio ambiente è molto cheap,” she says. (“My surroundings are very cheap.”)

Read more at Foreign Policy.