McDonald's has introduced a new line of "McItaly" sandwiches and salads in its Italian locations, including a burger topped with olive oil, onion, and smoked pancetta. To coincide with the new menu items is a marketing campaign with the tagline: "Il gusto McDonald's ha un nuovo sapore. Tutto italiano."

"Sicilian Tragedee," by Ottavio Cappellani (translated by Frederika Randall), is, according to The New York Times, "a funny novel that both celebrates and satirizes 21st-century Sicily...where donkey carts share the street with sports cars and everyone has a cellphone."

The New York Times crossword today features a clue for Italophiles: "Gas brand that's also an Italian pronoun." The answer, of course, is ESSO, a brand name derived from the phonetic pronounciation of the initials of Standard Oil ("S-O").

It's also one of those forgotten Italian subject pronouns that include egli, ella, esso, essa, essi, and esse.

A community member of the About.com Italian Language Forums points outs out that sometimes "it's all right to use a foreign word when the Italian equivalent is awkward or non-existent."

Case in point is the term ragazza di cui appendere la fotografia alla parete—a pin-up!