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La Crusca, and an argument that is four hundred years old
The Accademia della Crusca was founded in Florence in 1583 to sift the flour of Italian from its bran — crusca is bran, and the sifting metaphor is the whole programme. It produced the first dictionary of a modern European language in 1612, decades before the French or the English managed one, and it is still the body Italians mean when they ask what the correct form is. What it is not is a police force. It has no legal power, it publishes opinions rather than rulings, and its modern position on anglicisms is noticeably relaxed: it tracks them, it suggests Italian alternatives where one exists, and it observes that most borrowings die on their own within a decade. There has been one serious attempt to legislate. In 1923 and again in the thirties the Fascist government banned foreign words outright, invented replacements, and fined shopkeepers whose signs used them — this is where tramezzino came from, coined to replace sandwich, and it survived. So did autista for chauffeur and regista for director. Most of the rest did not. Note that the episode is why Italians are generally wary of language laws, and why the periodic newspaper piece announcing the death of Italian — the one Francesca is reading, with its brand and its target — tends to be read as a genre rather than as news.