Passato remoto

I learned a new verb tense in Italian tonight - passato remoto. It's used for anything that happened in the far past (unless you live in Southern Italy, as my professor said, then they use it all the time). According to my professor, some Italians who don't get a good education never learn to use this tense. That freaked me out. We're not expected to know how to conjugate it, just recognize it and be able to translate the verbs into passato prossimo (the normal past tense, like I ate dinner yesterday). But still... it shocked me. If your Italian professor, who's actually from Italy, says the tense is a torture... the be prepared. There's a reason why great thinkers like Dante and Da Vinci speak Italian... probably because you have to be pretty damn committed to fully understand that language. It's beautiful, it's fantastic, and it's a dangerous. Like so many things in life.