Pero, Ho Qualche Domande

Watched the RAInternational - or RAIUSA, as they now call it - broadcast again this morning. Basked in the beautiful Italian language with my Webster's New World Italian Dictionary at my side, as usual. Like so many others studying Italian, the strongest aspects of my skill at this point are nouns and adjectives. When trying to express myself in Italian, I mostly just utter nouns and point emphatically like a cavewoman, since my command of verb conjugation is miserable. Of course, like a typical American, I also have a varied library of expressions that sound like I know what's going on: Ottimo! (Great!) Davvero? (Really?) Certo. (Of course.) These just usually get me in trouble when Italians start off in a stream of regular conversation that I can not yet follow.
Still avoiding any meaningful focus on verbs that would allow my language skills to jump forward exponentially, I instead prefer to obsess over the sentence connectors (conjunctions, for the most part) that they use most often. The word "quindi", for instance. I hear it all the time. Turns out, it means, "therefore, so, or then".
The word "qualche" also pops up alot. Qualche means "a few".
With words like these that come up in my own speech patterns so often, it is amazing that I wasn't able to determine their definition in context (since I can, at least, figure out what they're talking about from the nouns).
Then there is my favorite: "pero". The o should have a small \ over it, but I can't get my blog to make that letter. "Pero", with the emphasis on the last syllable, means "yet, but, nevertheless, so". I can't seem to commit it to memory, and I look it up every single week.
As frustrated as I am with my inability to string whole sentences together in an appropriate tense, I still get a great deal of enjoyment out of sitting in front of my cable TV with my dictionary. Someday, when understanding Italian conversations is not so hard for me, I think I will still smile at the long and odd journey I took to get there.

Why Does RAI Always Show Historical Movies?

It's Sunday. We call it "Italian Day" in our house, because our local Comcast cable provider broadcasts six straight hours of RAInternational programming direct from Italy. 7:00 am to 1:00 pm every Sunday I can immerse myself in Italian language, culture, cuisine, and whatever else they dig up to show us Italy-hungry Americans.
We discovered this broadcast in 2001, so we've been making Sunday morning Italian television a high priority in our household for a while, and I have observed several trends in what they choose to show to the American audience.
The trend that forces my analysis is that, when RAInternational includes a film in their programming, it is almost always historical, dark, and depressing. Sure, every once in a while they'll include a light-hearted soap like "Capri" or a cute mini-series like "Il Padre Quasi Perfetto". But, the rule is that they choose to show sad movies, often taking place around either the time of the unification of Italy or the time of WWII.
If RAInternational seeks to broaden its American audience (not sure that they are, but let's just assume that they as a company are capitalistic in nature), why all the sturm and drang?
Trying to be completely fair about it, I have to wonder if it is an attempt to keep the memory of Italy's hardship of the last 150 years fresh in the minds of Italy's expatriates and other interested parties. Is it possible that Italians and Italian-Americans are also hard-wired to appreciate hardship movies? I really don't know.
As a student of Italy, I have a working knowledge of the main events that the country has gone through to arrive at today. I'm not sure I need to watch actors recreate that horror and misery of it week after week to "appreciate it more". As a result, I typically use movie time to get other things done around the house.
Wish there was someone I could ask to find out what about this type movie is so important to broadcast, at the risk of depressing their viewers each week.