Yes ma'am. My grandfather was making sculptures as part of some art festival or something of the sort. We stayed in Pietrasanta and then would venture out to Venice, Florence, etc and stay one night, and then return to Pietrasanta. It was with a large chunk of my mom's side of the family, so we went around being loud, annoying Puerto Rican tourists. Speaking Spanish didn't seem to help. I guess the Spanish have a worse reputation than Americans in Italy and in France! People would be rude until we switched to English. Then they were like, eh, Americans. And they'd be polite. =)
I might be in Forli in the fall for a conference. Don't know, as they haven't rejected my abstract yet (ahehe).
yes, pietrasanta is a famous city of art! cool that you grandfather does sculpures! what kind of material does he use? pietrasanta is well known for the marble-working...
well i think that usually italians (not me) see the USA as a mirage
now the euro is pretty strong compared to the dollar, so now we can travel easily there, but when we had the lira, USA were too expensive, and only richest people could afford to go there....and american were seen as richer than us, especially the ones who travelled to italy....so probably more respect were payed to them.
while spanish-speaking people not necessarily comes from usa, but more often from spain....and usually all the latino folks have a bad reputation around the world because we are messy, intrusive, talkative, and we are people who likes to party and create chaos.
it happened to me sometimes outside italy to be looked like "hey, look at those italians" like if we were some kind rare species of animal....specially in germany.
but i still remember when i went to wacken, and we were well organized for doing camping. we travelled with the car so we stopped many times cause the travel was long, about 20 hours. we stopped in a little parking area along the railway, and we started to prepare some pasta using the camping stove.
people looked at us like "ohhh italians
" but when a nice flavour of cooked pasta invaded all the parking area they all seemed to be suddently interested in what we were doing
then a couple of german old people took some courage and came to us, asking if they could sit there and taste some pasta!!!!
but being italians we have to bring forward the flag of our nation, we could not refuse to be as open and hospitable as we always are, so we ate together, having a good talk (they spoke a little bit of italian) and offered them also some good italian coffee!!!
when i go to the beach i like to walk without sneakers, naked foot 
here thanks god we dont have too much hot temps, summer is like 28..32, dont pass this,just in some cases, but now here is autumn so we have more cold weather, las week we had 6 degress
