Imagine my relief when I discovered a movie theater in Siena, right next to the supermarket and around the corner from my school! And in fact, the first week that I was here, they were playing Toy Story 4, something that I had been excited to see.
The experience was not quite what I had expected.
I had assumed — perhaps because of my cultural bias being rooted in the fact that this was an American film — that the movie would be with English audio and, perhaps, Italian subtitles. (When I watched movies at the theater in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood in New York, they were English audio with Spanish subtitles, so this probably influenced my assumptions.)
I was surprised, then, when I quickly realized that the film was dubbed in Italian. And no, there weren’t English subtitles. (In retrospect, why would there be, in Italy?!)
However, the good news is, I actually kept up pretty well! I probably understood about 1/5 of what they were saying, no doubt helped by the fact that it’s a fairly simple storyline and language appropriate for children. I admittedly relied on my friend, who’d seen the movie already in English, to help me out twice.
Now, it turns out they also have a “Cinema in Fortezza” program that is, as the name suggests, outdoors in what used to be a fortress here in Siena. I haven’t made it over there yet, but there are a few movies coming up in the next three weeks (some that I’ve seen already like Aladdin and Bohemian Rhapsody, some that I haven’t like Green Book and The Secret Life of Pets 2) so I’m excited to try that out.
In the mean time, today I think I will get brave and go try Spider-Man: Far from Home in Italian.
Augurami buona fortuna!
