Italian of the east

So I bade goodbye to IITB with a heavy heart on the 6th of May and have been savouring the joy of having absolutely nothing to do at all since. But that feeling didnt last long and I thought "Why not learn italian?". No, there is no logic to why the thought struck. It just did. And thats what i liked about it. No strings attached.
When i finally got down to learning it off the web (nobody teaches italian in vijayawada), one of the most striking aspects of the language to me seemed to be the similarity in pronunciation between my native lang. Telugu and Italian. After wondering if this similarity was a result of my over-fertile imagination, i searched on this topic.
And bingo! They are so similar in pronunciation that 19th century Englishmen actually called telugu the "Italian of the east". The reason is that both telugu and italian have words which most often end with a vowel sound. Full-mouthed languages, as my sister likes to call them. Also noticable is the prominent usage of stress on 't's, 'r's (sorry abt how that may have sounded) and 'l's.
While that meant pronunciation in italian would be easy for me, it was of no help with the grammar. Objects have genders assigned to them in italian and are not neutral like in telugu. This has been a major pain in the neck for me with hindi and it wasnt pleasing to learn its the same with italian. Heck, i'll worry abt that when i actually get down to conversing in italian.
ciao!