I lived in Florence and Sicily for a couple summers then continued on with Italian in college. My two degrees (which Im trying to finish off right now) are ethnolinguistics and opera performance so Ive taken German, Spanish, French, Russian, and more Italian in the last three years. Portuguese is enough like Italian and Spanish that I can get by though anyone who is fluent just thinks I have a bizarre accent.
Well...kind of....
Italian and German are my strongest languages after English though.