Witty Little Knitter

Somebody should have told me that I had to learn Italian for this book.

I get it. It's set in Italy and I'm OK with having a few Italian phrases in conversations between Italian and English people (especially when neither understands the other language well and you want to convey all the confusion/lack of understanding) but why do we need to have the conversation of two Italians in Italian as well and not simply assume that your readers are bright enough to assume that this is translation convention? (And it's not all the time. Mostly they are in English but there is one couple that just talks in Italian...why?)

And yes you do get some sort of translation (Basically X says something and then the next sentence in the narration is "She knew that sooner or later he would ask her where the girl was") but it still makes no bloody sense except getting the wor-count up (and it's not like Geoerge-novels are short in the first place)

(Why can't I use these tricks to blow up my BA-Thesis?)