Meaning of word Respiro...

i don't know if you're Italian, but I'm. I Think we should stop complaining for our representatio on the big screen, saying everything about us (about Sicilians above all) is a stereotype. Because I've been living for a month in Lampedusa, and another one in a little town on the Sardegna's coast: that's the real life in fishing villages of those zones, many people still have that kind of mentality and few years ago it was even worst... And it's so fascinating!!

<i>general image of lazy Sicilians way of life</i>

The movie takes place on and was shot on Lampedusia, not Sicily. The people depicted in the film were Lampedusians, not Sicilians. Against that background, it seems unlikely the director/writer was trying to make any particular point about Sicilians.

However, the portrayal of the Lampedusians' way of expression and life is too exagerated. The gunning down of the dogs, the frocks on the women, and their way of living in general contributes more to what the director/producer want us to imagine and belief rather than what really is, stereotyping the general image of lazy Sicilians way of life and the traditional Italianicity into contemporary life.

I couldn't agree more. This movie is so phoney. Unfortunately, it isn't just the Lampedusans and Italians as a whole that are transformed into some sort of quaint caricature: the stock character of the "free spirit" as materialised by Golino is also a walking cliché. I will simply never understand how this movie could have been taken seriously at all.

To anyone who may happen to go to Lampedusa on holiday (I have, twice), if you enjoyed this movie you might be disappointed to discover it is nowhere near as "picturesque" as it is shown to be here. This could have been a good portrayal of Lampedusa in, say, the 1960s, but not the 90s or noughties. Even this backwater has a supermarket these days, dammit!

http://web.tiscali.it/lampedusa/res.htm

On that page it says that, "Respiro" means "Souffle Breath".

[deleted]

I looked up 'boccanera' in an online dictionary:

http://www.wordreference.com/iten/boccanera

and got this result:


We found no English translation for 'boccanera' in our Italian to English Dictionary.

It sounds like 'buccaneer' -- but that makes no sense.

So how about telling us what it means?

As for the 'homoeroticism', do you regard every film that features a good-looking boy as homoerotic? You must see more homos in Hollywood than Jerry Falwell does :-)