I wrote:
> there are some varieties of dialect spoken in Liguria, Lombardy
> and Romagna that may sound like 'foreign' languages to standard
> Italian ears!
As a more facetious note, let me add that the Lombard (Gallo-Italian)
dialect spoken in the province of Bergamo in Lombardy is one of the
hardest to understand for people not native of that province. For its
phonology, see what you can grasp from this article from the Italian
Wikipedia:
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialetto_bergamasco
Here is a song sung in a variety of this dialect, of whose text I
could barely understand a few words:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62xWZRUP2P0
Some years ago I read on Venice's local newspaper that an old woman,
who had lost sight of the tourist group she was part of in the
overcrowded St. Mark's quare, had been kept for hours in the nearby
police station because nobody could understand what she spoke.
Everybody thought she could only be a foreigner, but, after many
failed attempts at communicating with her, someone suddenly realized
she was from a mountain valley near Bergamo, and she could not speak
or understand standard Italian!
Regards,
Francesco