[A fair amount of awkward phrasing that I haven't tried to correct. Generally could use some more color: for most of these games, we get only the title and maybe something about the robustness of the parser. More sense of the style--humorous, swashbuckling--and what, if anything, makes them noteworthy as games (examples of particularly clever puzzles, vivid writing (if it'll translate), well-realized characters, etc.) It would also be interesting to know whether any of these--present or past--have been translated into English, since much of the readership won't speak Italian.
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You seem to be quoting Colombini throughout, but it's not clear. Preface each quote with something like "Colombini has observed that..." or "Notes Colombini:"
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Given the audience, comparison to games in English might be particularly effective to give a sense of the history: if the early mysteries had some of the same feel as Infocom's Witness or Suspect, say, that's a comparison that would resonate.
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More specific comments in brackets below.]
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"The best thing would be a parser with just one word:<br>
>BARMAN<br>
Barman: What?<br>
>BEER<br>
Barman: A beer for you.<br>
>MONEY?<br>
Barman: five bucks.<br>
>PAY<br>
Barman: Thanx.<br>
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So, this series of sentences seems perfect to me, maybe I'll use it to write a game."
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The man who speaks is Enrico Colombini, programmer from Brescia (northern Italy), the pioneer of adventure games in Italy -- the Don Woods of the Mediterrean, to be clear. He has a curious aversion for[to] the sophisticated parser invented by Infocom. And that's why he said that bizarre thing -- the parser with just one word. Fun, fantasy and easy plain work: no complicated sentences and no NPCs to ask, "What's wrong." It's provocative, certainly.
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The first game<br>
It's a boutade [I'd use another word or phrase] of the man who, in 1982, wrote the first text adventure of Italian history: "Avventura nel castello". "I didn't know Infocom games yet and, certainly, that was a good thing. Had I played them, I would have tried to emulate their parser ("put the red sheet and the green one in the big drawer, then close it with the strange key"), things would have gotten really complicated, I would've lost a lot of time, and maybe I would've given up. At the time I hadn't yet discovered that easy things are, often, the best way to succeed.  I needed a lot of years to understand this, but that's another story."
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Twenty years later, "Avventura nel castello" could [can] still compete against most (if not all) Italian adventure games. [Including those with full-sentence parsers? Big claim. Explain why.] And at the time, without exaggeration, the game - for its quality - would put Scott Adams to shame (but Scott Adams wrote a lot of games, and Colombini just five or six). "Avventura nel castello" was first released for Apple II: at the beginning it was sold only in a shop owned by a friend of Enrico, and then it was distributed by the "Jackson" editorial group: "The sales were never high, but the satisfaction was great because a lot of players wrote to find out more about the game. With "Avventura nel Castello" and with the board game "Melopoli" (a computer version of Monopoly) I earned, if I remember right, three or four million. The same as Scott Adams - but my millions were in lire, his in dollars." In 1985 the MS-DOS version of the game was released (the last edition is dated 1996).
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[say more about "Avventura" for the 99% of the readership who hasn't heard of it--plot? genre? difficulty? has anyone translated it, is anyone planning to?]
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Italian parser<br>
But what is the origin of the bizarre proposal of the "Parser with one word"? The origin is the Italian tradition of text adventure[s], I think. Only after the
arrival of Inform in Italy did people release games with a parser based on more than a verb/noun pair. Italian players, especially those who don't know
English (and there are many), are not used to a complex parser.  It sounds bad to their ears. [can you elaborate? what sounds bad?] "Avventura nel castello" and Colombini's other games have a verb/noun parser. And the same goes for most of the games released in the eighties. "Avventura nel castello" didn't have a large distribution because it ran on the Apple and then on Ms-Dos, when the most common home computers were Cbm64 and Spectrum. A lot of people wanted to play that game but couldn't. There were also a lot of people having fun with Infocom games, but the problems were the language and the slowness of the Cbm. The most common non-Italian games were those of Scott Adams: not much text to translate, an easy parser, speed and, in some cases, graphics (and graphics, whatever you think, means
audience). These games had a very large distribution (more than "Avventura nel Castello") because the software piracy was everywhere: at the time I'd seen
an original game only nine or ten times. The rest was a big exchange, under the tables but also over the counters of the shops, of tapes (or floppy disks) with
cracked games. [just Scott Adams or others as well?] And in the videogame magazines there appeared the first columns with hints for adventurers.  (In the golden age those columns became pages.)
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The newspaper stands<br>
The adventures were still games for a small audience. Things changed when they arrived in the newspaper stands. Yes: the newsstands became gold mines for
adventurers. [Italian? Not? It's not clear.] In 1985, the first issue of a monthly publication called "Next Strategy" was released: on the tape there were three graphic adventures for Cbm (written by Roberto Tabacco and from the no-better-known Hans Piu). If you play them today the only pleasure comes from satisfying your nostalgia, for the rest is a frustration: it's impossible to say that these games have a parser. [Maybe some titles and some more specific details about the games themselves?] The game understands only the right sequence of commands that lead to victory: nothing out of the scheme, no provision of answers (even silly ones) for wrong actions. We are very far from "Avventura nel castello" and also from Scott Adams. Regression? Maybe. To win it was not enough to solve the puzzles; you had also to guess the exact words in the mind of the author -- to the point where there was a game that didn't understand the word "follow" but only the word "track". [Good example! More?] Certainly there are reasons for all this. At the time the standard (in other countries too) was more or less that one. Nobody dreamed of emulating Infocom: the magazine was sold every month, and you could not expect that the editor (who wasn't Bill Gates) would hire a team of programmers and beta-testers. And everyone was happy with the results, because the players were enthusiastic: and that made it possible to continue without raising the budget (which was already very high for such games). There was also another reason. The magazine had a high price: eight or nine thousand lire (roughly four or four and a half dollars). Had the games been very easy, the line of people requesting a refund would have been longer than the line of people ready to buy the next issue with new games and the solutions of the old ones. The strategy, instead, was to insert a very difficult puzzle in one of the games, so the players had to buy the next issue. [Ha! Example? Spoilers aren't likely to be a big issue.]
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More or less at the same level were the games of the "Dream" series (Editions Fermont, first issue november 1985, with three Cbm games in every issue): they had black and white graphics, retro style, and good and onirics [not sure what this word is supposed to be] plots. In every issue there was a game without graphics, to make the most of the memory of the Cbm and offer more text and more puzzles.
 
The Quill and higher quality<br>
The quality of the games (parser included) got better with Bonaventura Di Bello. He, in his twenties, bought by mistake a "Adventure: A planet of death" by Artic Computing (while Colombini was hypnotized by Crowther and Woods, authors of "Adventure" [er, what does this mean?]). A little time later Di Bello discovered The Quill (an illegal copy, of course, but then he bought an original one from England) and wrote a game on his Spectrum. He sent it to a magazine called "Load'n'Run" and, in that moment, began his fortune: "I was paid two hundred thousand lire (one hundred dollars).  Another two and I would have been able to buy a new Spectrum!". The editor, Arscom, launched a new series: "Epic 3000", with three games every month. Roberto Tabacco was the author of the ones for Cbm, Di Bello wrote the ones for Spectrum (with The Quill and The Illustrator). The first issue was sold on april 1986. The games, not protected by a antipiracy password (though they were in the following issues), were: "Ring", "Duca Lynce" and "Il galeone scomparso" (Cbm), "Et in action", "L'occhio del condor", "Il triangolo maledetto" (Spectrum). The influence of the Level 9 games was clear. [why? how were they similar?]
In december the last issue of the magazine was sold; it  then became "Viking" (first issue: january 1987), with a new editor, "Edizioni Hobby" [was this the company publishing it? "editor" is usually a person]: Tabacco was no longer working there, and the games (three, the same for Commodore and Spectrum) were all written by Di Bello. Two months earlier (november 1986) the "Edizioni Hobby" had launched the series "Explorer" (three games, the same for Cbm and Msx): here Di Bello ported to Commodore the Spectrum games of "Epic 3000". Sometimes a game continued in two or more episodes. The total of adventures written by Di Bello is 74: he was able to write a game every week and was paid five hundred thousand lire (250 dollars) per game. "It would have been wonderful to live writing those games; it would have been the same as living as a writer, or maybe better, because the audience of text games was superb." [Whom are you quoting?] The first game of Di Bello, "Dimensione sconosciuta", is impossible to find: "Today I would like to remember it, rewrite it and release it online." Last three were never released. "I remember the names, "New Pasqua" and "Sorsi di terrore". The third one was a thriller with the PC hiring a killer to kill him and let all pass like a suicide. I wasn't the author, the author was Marco Gobbi; I tried to contact him again some time ago, but he's vanished." [Whom are you quoting? Please make it clear.] Most games, at the time, had graphics, and there were people who released "single" games, without thinking to launch a series. The stories were always very short and the locations never more than ten. [again, more about the games themselves--difficult? well-written? well-designed?] The name of the characters, we'll never
understand why, were always anglophone (I don't remember even one Italian one): Dust Hanter, Jack Byteson, Jonathan Thompson, Harry O'Hara, Alan Simmons.
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Inside and out the system<br>
The parser still was verb/noun [two-word might be a little clearer]. But there were some exceptions, above all in the single games or in the short series, like the mystery stories edited by
Systems ("Gialli Commodore", just one game per issue). [When are we here? I've lost track.] In these cases, in fact, there was no hurry to release a lot of games every month, the authors were not pros like Di Bello, but people that had an idea for a game, released it, and often vanished forever from the scene of text adventures (just like Enrico Ragaini, author of "Il mistero della piramide" for Cbm) [who? this is not a comparison that many will pick up on--maybe "for example"?]. The Systems mystery stories were the integration of a series of lessons to write text adventures published by the magazine "Personal Computer" and "Commodore Computer Club": those lessons were very good and in them appeared, for the first time, the concept of library [I'm having trouble parsing this. Do you mean that the games provided for synonyms?] with words about the theory of locations, of the inventory [whoa--had there not been "rooms" and inventory prior to this? if so, explain how that worked] and suggestions for an "intelligent" parser [again, elaborate]. 
 
The mystery stories by Systems were very well written and, among the games of the time, are the most similar to modern IF: yes, interactive stories. Like "Il mistero di Zambesi Waters", by Sandro Certi and Franco Todi.  The location is Africa and in the opening screen there is a promise: "this game accepts sentences with one or two words, with a maximum of NINE". It's possible to type something like "Jump down from the bus". But we are not inside a system: those are predefined sentences that are good only for one event, one puzzle. If, in another and not predefined situation, you type "Jump down", inevitably the game says "I don't understand" (and not "Jump down from what?"). We are still far from a sophisticated parser, but we have good stories. [Good explanation. Elaborate a bit on the stories--plots, genres, what made them interesting.] We don't have a system of verbs, like the ones offered by The Quill. It's not strange that the games written by Di Bello with The Quill were considered the best ones: if the author has a system, a table of verbs or sentences to start with, he can get good results with minimal effort. 
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[this next bit is a bit of a departure--maybe a subhead to indicate you're shifting gears? Further Parser Developments: Modulo Base?]
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On the tapes of "Explorer" there was the announcement: "In this magazine you'll find a dossier to solve and to learn to write adventure games". The editors understood that a lot of people wanted to write their own games. To write a good adventure, with an elementary parser, is undeniably easier than writing a good shoot 'em up. So the market was open to this kind of experiment. And the book "Scrivere un gioco di avventura sul personal computer" (1986) by Enrico Colombini had great success. With the book was sold a tape with some adventure game and the famous "Modulo Base", a system, a grill of verbs to enlarge to create your own game using Basic. I don't remember brilliant games written using "Modulo Base"; I remember the ones of Colombini, among them "L'Anello di Lucrezia Borgia", "L'Apprendista Stregone" e "L'astronave condannata". [Translate and give some more details about these games, since you've described them as "brilliant"; also, are you saying that Colombini used Modulo Base? It's not clear.] Di Bello too used the "Modulo Base" and here his history as an author of text adventures meets that of Colombini: "I used Modulo Base to realize a sort of The Quill for Msx. I used it to create a dark/light routine (with timers for lamps or other light objects), and other things offered by The Quill. Then I tried to do the same with Amiga's Amos Basic, but it was too late to launch text adventures again and the project never took life. But I'm sure Enrico remembers that night when I woke him to ask a suggestion-- I hope he forgave me!". [The dark/light detail is good--more? Also, are you quoting Di Bello or Colombini?]
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In the meantime, you could find, in newsstands (of course), an illegal italian version of The Quill. On the magazines people announced "new amateur adventure game", but without Internet the distribution was difficult, especially the distribution of Apple games, a home computer not much present in italian houses. Only using the personal archive of Colombini is it possible today to recall some interesting games. [I'm not sure what this means. Is Colombini now maintaining an archive of his and other games?] Like the good "Catania Gions" (1985), wrote by three men from Pisa, Fausto Daluiso and Giuseppe and Gianluca Pomponi: it's a sort of Indiana Jones story with graphics similar to the one of "Death in the Caribbean". "I knew the three authors -- says Enrico -- when they asked me to write a plot for another game and I gave them the script of "L'isola del Giaguaro", but today we have just some demo pictures, since this game was never completed". [Whom are you quoting?] Blue Bottazzi wrote "Cappuccetto Rosso" (1987), a only text game inspired by the famous fable for children. [Which famous fable? Would translating the title help?] "La rapina di Corsut" has, instead, a curious story. Written by Luca Nosotti and Carlo Vellano in 1985, it was submitted to a programming competition, but the jury didn't accept it because of the presence, in the game, of a group of robbers. Maybe it's the only case of censorship in the history of adventure games! [Interesting. Were the robbers portrayed sympathetically? More details.] Another game is "L'uscita" by a little-known Ugo: it's a only text adventure with interesting multiple choices (and graphical map). [Examples, more details.] Possibly there were some lost games (for Cbm and Apple or Spectrum) that were better than the ones sold. But maybe we'll never know.
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The dark age<br>
The age of games sold in newspapers stands arrived at the end with the last series: Epyx 3001 (editor "Arscom", first issue january 1988). Every issue had five or six games only for Cbm, but the sales were bad and the series closed after six months. The dark age of text adventures occurs at the same time in Italy as in the rest of the world. The games written at the end of 80s and the beginning of 90s are few, those sold nearly zero. There were some bad attempts to realize games using well-known comic characters like Diabolik and Dylan Dog, but the result is action adventure with many lows and almost no highs. [Explain why. Bad design, unoriginal?] One of the most interesting things happens in 1990, when on the review Amiga Byte appears "Demo Adventure", an adventure toolkit (written by Maurizio Giunti) that allows you to create games with a good parser ("attack orc with the sword") but, curiously, doesn't permit synonyms for the nouns (while it does for verbs). With this system, a guy from Imperia (northwestern Italy), Marco Vallarino, wrote nearly twenty text adventures: among them is "Dracula", notable because offers a lot of locations (84). At the time there was also an innovative experiment by Alessandro Uber and Fabrizio Venerandi: they created a text adventure for Mud, Necronomicom, played via Videotel (a system of connected computers, used by pubs and restaurants to attract guests) till 1994, and via Telnet since 2001. [More details about Necronomicon. Lovecraft, I assume?]
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Revival<br>
Anyway, the revival begins in 1995 when Vallarino reopens the sipario with "Sfida all'ignoto" e "Il giardino incantato" and Robero Barabino develops a very nice game (underrated): "Alieni per sempre", a text adventure with graphics that is a parody of the Tv serial "Star Trek" and bears structural similarities to "Wonderland" by post-Magnetic Scrolls. A curiosity: the first scene of "Sfida all'ignoto" (a Ms-Dos game with an Infocom statusline) is similar to the opening scene of "Avventura nel castello": an airplane crash. [Parser style? Don't lose that thread. Also, what are the "structural similaries" to Wonderland? Not everyone's played that one.]
 
But the parser changes with the arrival of Inform (today there don't exist games written with Tads or Hugo because of the lack of italian libraries). Ilario Nardinocchi finishes the first Inform italian libraries [when?], while Luca Melchionna and Barabino write the first Italian Inform games: "Zazie" [when?] (inspired by the book of Queneau [not sure what this is; more detail]) and "Non sar  un'avventura", a funny game that takes place on a beach full of people and girls to catch. The year is 1999. [for what?] In the meantime, Giovanni Riccardi rewrites the Italian libraries, opens an Italian website for Inform and translates, for didactical purpouses, "Adventure" and "Toyshop". On the scene arrives then Tommaso Caldarola, who writes the first game using the libraries of Riccardi: "Uno zombie a Deadville", horror splatter winner of the 2001 "Italian adventure of the year" (the first edition of the competition, 2000, went to "Non sar  un'avventura"). A lot of people rediscovered adventures thanks to the newsgroup it.comp.giochi.avventure testuali and to the website www.ifitalia.cjb.net. [More details about how games are being distributed now: is it all free download, is there any commercial presence?]
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But the parser old style does not vanish forever (and maybe this is a good thing, who knows?). Not all Italian authors know english, the first hurdle to learning Inform. So other games are released with the verb/noun system: the series by Jois (finally a female author!) [what are the names of the games in this series? what are they like?] and "Enigma" by Marco Vallarino, both for Ms-Dos [more details about this one too]. With the revival there is, also, an operation nostalgia: "Progetto Lazzaro" (www.progettolazzaro.org), a website that hosts the old adventures sold in the newsstand, with documentation and news.
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The attraction for the puzzles<br>
Since 1982 authors, parser, and systems have changed, but not puzzles, and maybe they'll never change. Italians love puzzles, all the Italian adventures are puzzle-oriented and, in the reviews, the presence of the puzzles is important to get a high valutation. Italians don't have games like Photopia: the idea is that adventures are games and games need to be challenging. With or without the avveniristic [not sure what this word is supposed to be] one word parser launched by Enrico Colombini.
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Francesco Cordella, january/february 2002
(thanks to Enrico Colombini, Bonaventura Di Bello, Marco Vallarino,
Paolo Vece).