Always weirds me out how even the Germans have their own names for most of the bigger cities in northern and middle Italy, even though most of those names are perfectly easy to pronounce using German spelling rules. Native English speakers (who didn’t spend years learning a romance language (other than French) or Germanic language) literally cannot pronounce most Italian city names, but if you grew up with German you can definitely say “Firenze” or “Milano” without deviating too much from how Italians would pronounce these - even the “z” is the same!
As an American, Milano doesn’t seem like it’s hard to pronounce. We even have a brand of cookies named Milano, although it probably gets slightly mispronounced. The first syllable usually ends up with the I being pronounced more like it would in “mid” than “me”
Always weirds me out how even the Germans have their own names for most of the bigger cities in northern and middle Italy, even though most of those names are perfectly easy to pronounce using German spelling rules. Native English speakers (who didn’t spend years learning a romance language (other than French) or Germanic language) literally cannot pronounce most Italian city names, but if you grew up with German you can definitely say “Firenze” or “Milano” without deviating too much from how Italians would pronounce these - even the “z” is the same!
As an American, Milano doesn’t seem like it’s hard to pronounce. We even have a brand of cookies named Milano, although it probably gets slightly mispronounced. The first syllable usually ends up with the I being pronounced more like it would in “mid” than “me”
Milano, maybe, but Firenze? No chance.