A student told me about this VOIP system which allows you to make calls from your PC to real phones. It's dirt cheap at 10 Euros for 120 days of calls and you only pay if your destination is not a country which accepts free calls. At the moment, the US, Italy, the UK and Ireland are countries which cost nothing more to call. The only limit seems to be that you can blabber for a max of one hour before they cut you off – but this is not a huge problem and you can even call straight back if you really feel like giving your vocal cords a thorough workout.
I have no idea for just how long this service will stay at such a great price, but I'm going to be exploiting it to the maximum to call friends and family in the UK and elsewhere. I guess the more people that use the service, the longer it will remain freeish, so get dialing!

Stop reading, start speaking
Stop translating in your head and start speaking Italian for real with the only audio course that prompt you to speak.
Oh, and if you were worrying about giving your dosh (all ten Euros) to some unknown company, maybe I should mention that this service was mentioned on a certain Beppe Grillo's site.
The call quality is great too. Not so much email, as ephone. Good stuff.