Why learn Italian when Google Translate can do all the work?

“To speak another language is to possess another soul.”  — Charlemagne

I was having a glass of wine at a sleepy bar in the seaside town of Scilla, at the toe of the boot in Italy.  After a long day at sea, a group of fishermen gathered at the table next to me, their boats and nets just a stone’s throw from where I sat with my wife.  With the sun setting and the wine flowing, we had a long discussion about world politics, the rise and fall of global powers and the like.  They told me stories about the Greeks that had been in that area long ago.  In fact, Homer wrote of a sea monster that lived in their very town.  Amazing.  Oh, yes, the story of the monster was amazing, but I was more surprised that I was having this discussion in Italian.

I had dabbled with the language off and on for several years, most of the time spent doing anything other than studying the language.  It was that night, sipping wine with the fisherman, I learned that the language, my second, could provide me with a new lens on the world.  In that moment I had forgotten about vocabulary, grammar, and syntax.  I was simply communicating and learning.  That night I learned more about Greek literature than ever before, and for the first time I was interested in it.

With English as the lingua franca of our time and free tools such as Google Translate in our pockets, why, why would anyone subject themselves to the demands of learning a second language?  It is not as though Italian will be the second language of the English-speaking world anytime soon.  For me, learning Italian did not directly impact my career.  Much to my chagrin, I don’t expect to be living in Italy for more than a month at a time in the year future.  Beyond the ever-expanding reach of American culture (and language) through music and films, most young Italians have taken several English courses.  In the cities of Italy, in the tourist centers, English is everywhere.  It is not uncommon to find to non-native English speakers from separate continents land on English as their best way to communicate.  Is learning Italian worth the time and energy?

Since my evening in Scilla, my own odyssey with the language has taken me to many unexpected places.  One morning I was sipping coffee with friends at a small café in Tuscany.  An older gentleman wandered by several times, with an ear toward our table.  He tried a few words of English on us, and I struck up a conversation in Italian with our new friend Renato.  Imagine our curiosity as he shared stories of his youth in war torn Italy.  We smiled as he recounted bringing food and water to downed and hidden, American airmen during the Allied invasion.  We cried when we heard the price that some paid in his village to hide the flyers.

The sweet sounds of the Italian language opened doors on another trip to the Pienza area of Tuscany.  Driving by an olive orchard, we opted to stop.  Perhaps the farmer might share some secrets about the land, and yes, he did.  After learning about the trees, the harvest, and the oil production process, he sent us into town to meet his wife and son.  After explaining ourselves as best we could in Italian, they shared their homemade wine and cheese, and sold us a few bottles of olive oil. 

Could we have had those conversations, those experiences with Google Translate as an cumbersome intermediary?  Could we have understood all that they had to share?  Could we have felt Renato’s joy as the American land force arrived, and he rode in a jeep with a chocolate bar from his new friends?  Non lo so!  (I don’t know, but probably not.)