On The Other Side Of The Mountains

I learned a new Italian word the other day: oltralpe, meaning "on the other side of the Alps" and, in the article that I was reading, referring to France.

In France, a similar expression used to refer to Britain is "outre - Manche" or "on the other side of the channel". An English equivalent might be "on the continent" but, while the English expression generally refers to a glamorous place where the people have exotic quirks like drinking tea with lemon and driving on the wrong side of the road, I have long harboured the suspicion that "outre - Manche" implies something more along the lines of "beyond the pale", with the only worse geographical slur being "outre Atlantique", but this might just be down to the contexts I've encountered the expression in. Any Francophones care to comment?

Anyway, as well as taking delight in my own cleverness at figuring out the meaning of oltralpe, the cynical, twisted part of me was quite pleased to discover that maybe, just maybe, the Italians harbour a similar "us and them" attitude towards the French.

More on this later, if my dear readers on the other side of the mountains will promise not to be offended...