One of the audio courses I listened to, on Great Music, claims that the Italians have significantly more and more passionate operas because of the language - lots of vowel sounds that you can hold for long periods of time in the arias, while German is much more gutteral and harder to write opera for, so they rarely achieve the heights of Italian opera.

This book is much more fun than my previous Italian textbook and my old French book, though. I have to wonder if the artist knew what he or she was doing - Paul's eyes fixed on the professor's chest is especially obvious, and Mark's stiffness in the third picture is pretty obvious, too. :D