As a native speaker of Florentine Tuscan Italian, I often have more trouble understanding other Italian dialects than other Latin-derived languages such as Cast

As a native speaker of Florentine Tuscan Italian, I often have more trouble understanding other Italian dialects than other Latin-derived languages such as Castilian, Catalan and Portuguese. My maternal grandmother came from a small town in Abruzzo and nobody could understand her when she was arguing with her sister in their dialect. The truth is that these "dialects" are indeed completely separate languages evolved from Latin with strong influences from various waves of domination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italy_in_the_Middle_Ages#/media/File:Italy_1000_AD.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italy_in_the_Middle_Ages#/medi... Wikipedia has more details on the present situation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Italy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Italy