Most educated Italians are still forced to study Latin as teenagers (although numbers have shrunk in the last decade or so). And of course, Romans invented lawyers...<p>Seriously, once you look for it, you see it very clearly. You can usually spot Italians writing in English for their overuse of &quot;the&quot;, their sentence length, and a higher frequency of passive verbs. If it feels like that but the number of &quot;the&quot;s is correct, the only explanation is that you are reading Ian McEwan.