My first thought when seeing this was "E allora?!"

Italy's regions are pretty interesting in their linguistic and cultural variety, I guess. The broad range of languages spoken is fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Italy#/media/File...

Because it's interesting. Evidently, others agree otherwise it would not have been upvoted to the front page.

Perhaps, it's because a large portion of the HN audience is in America, where autonomous regions are more or less alien to our understanding?

Edit: Puerto Rico, the Native American reservations and a bunch of islands. I'm ready for vacation, folks. Thanks for the corrections. This article is still neat, though.

Autonomous regions (regioni a statuto speciale) have much less prerogatives than American states. They receive more transfers from the central government and can legislate on some limited matters.

Imagine Kentucky receiving twice the fiscal transfers of Ohio and being able to legislate on fishing and museums, while Ohio can’t. That’s the gist of it.

There is an analogue that exist in the US; the Native American reservations.

Most Americans would prefer not to think about them too much.

You have autonomous states, [edited out: A mild oath of exasperation, annoyance, frustration, anger, or surprise]. And Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands.

Please edit swipes out of your posts to HN. We're trying to avoid that kind of thing here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This strikes me as an unnecessarily antagonistic reply.

FWIW, I'm the parent he was replying to and I was fine with and appreciative of his correction. It seemed the appropriate amount of antagonism, given my error.

I was not even trying to be a little antagonistic, really. It was mostly (a too colloquial display of) surprise given the huge amount of autonomy of every “region” in the country.

Yep that’s essentially how I saw it. Maybe the holidays are stressing people out. :-)

> Trentino Alto-Adige

An autonomous region that only contains two small autonomous provinces (the only two autonomous provinces of Italy), with big differences between the two

Ahah I was expecting more hype in see an article about Molise =)