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 An imposing equestrian statue of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius dominated the room where Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani met on Monday.

But Rouhani could not admire some of the other masterpieces at Rome's world-famous Capitoline Museums, which hosted the meeting.

 The United States, between the 1880’s and 1924, admitted about 4 million Italian immigrants. As Leon Wieseltier, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, observed to me, “We got Enrico Fermi, Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, Antonin Scalia — and Al Capone. Who in their right mind would suggest that the Italian immigration was not a great blessing for our country?”

 A connoisseur’s love of Italian modernist painting, abstract in style and modest in scale, lies behind this compendious, museum-style exhibition, organized by the dealer Gian Enzo Sperone. It’s the sort of historical show that can take decades to pull together. And that this can be done on such a scale by a commercial gallery is surely only possible because the art in question still has a fairly limited set of of devotees and remains obtainable. 

It's always a little funny listening to someone speak English as a second language. Their pronunciation of certain words and the roundabout sentences they use to express themselves seem adorable if not harmless. But how do we sound when speaking a second language? In many cases our mistakes are earth shattering for us and life scarring for them. Here are the top five mistakes Americans make after about a year of studying Italian.