My relationship with Piedmontese, the dialect of my region, has always been ambivalent. Growing up in a small rural community, I learned it without even noticing, because everyone around me would speak it. Even my parents, who would always speak in Italian to me, often switched to Piedmontese when chatting to one another. My grandparents used it exclusively, just like pretty much everyone  from that generation, that born in the first twenty years of the 20th century. 

While there was nothing wrong in understanding our regional dialect, speaking it, for people of my generation —me included — used to be an entirely different story: as a children in school, and even more so as teenagers, we wouldn’t deign our peers speaking in Piedmontese of a second glance.