Italian Trap

This is a history of how I was THE BEST Jeopardy host EVER. The year is 2025. I went to Estonia with my school for an Erasmus + project and it was extremely cool.

There were 4 countries there, Italy, Estonia, Greece and Portugal and every night after our activities we would have a cultural night. Normally, during these nights each country presents a little of their culture to the others, brings typical food and drinks from their country and everyone has fun.

This time, things went a little differently. Each country would talk about a different country. So, Estonia presented Portugal, Italy presented Greece, Greece presented Estonia and Portugal presented Italy.

Each country had different ideas on how to present the other. Estonia did a quiz about Portugal (that we so embarrassingly lost). Italy did a theatre where they played as typical Greek people. Greece presented a bunch of pictures that the Greek people had taken while they explored Estonia before the project. Our idea, the best idea of course, we were going to host a Jeopardy about Italian culture.

For those who don’t know it Jeopardy is a game where you normally have 4 categories and each category has 4 different questions. These questions have an assigned number of points that you earn, the more points the harder the question. At the end you can choose how many points you want to bet on the final question. You get it right, they double, you get it wrong, you lose all of them.

We set up our board with different categories and different amounts of them. I do not remember the categories in specific, but they were good. After making the teams and starting the game, we understood how CHAOTIC it would be. So, I decided to do something about it.

I walked to the front of everyone and just like a TV host I started hosting that stuff. Pointing to whose turn it was to choose the question and, my favourite part, going “ITALY LORE 600! 3! 2! 1! GO!!”. It was question after question, everyone was having fun and laughing. And YEAH, we did have some technical problems, but who doesn’t.

Everything was going as planned, some groups were winning, some were losing. But everything would change, when the last question attacked. You might be thinking “What would this question be? What could be so hard that it could decide who wins?” and to that my dear reader I say, it was the hardest question of them all. (at least for Italians)

‘Does pineapple belong on pizza?’

The bets were made and dice were rolled. Now, they only needed to answer. They knew what was the right answer, they KNEW that we had chosen the answer to make fun of this whole conundrum, but would they sacrifice their pride to win?

One by one, just like flies to a fly trap, they lost. Saying that “NO, OF COURSE NOT, PORCO DIO”. But one group put winning in front of pride, and they won.

This was a story of how we angered the Italians, a story about pride and more importantly a story about pineapple on pizza.