Spanish and Turkish language up in Cyprus; English and French down

Nicosia es el centro y la capital de un distrito administrativo (Distrito de Nicosia), y después de la caída del muro de Berlín, es la única ciudad capital del mundo dividida por un muro, con las partes norte (turca) y sur (griega), separadas por la "Línea Verde", una zona desmilitarizada mantenida por las Naciones Unidas.

Cyprus Mail has an article from just a few hours ago with a good amount of numbers showing the popularity of foreign languages in Cyprus compared to a few years ago.

In short: Spanish is way up, perhaps somewhat due to the popularity of its soap operas and its perception as an easy language to learn. French is down somewhat because it seems to be mandatory for a few years and by the time they reach lyceum age (secondary school) they have already studied it for a few years, and now may prefer to move on to something else.

As for the languages on the curriculum, the following have been added over the years:

The study of foreign languages has become increasingly important in the school curriculum with Cyprus’ accession to the EU, with French and German being added in 2001, Russian in 2002, and Turkish in 2003.

Thanks to the increased probability of reunification (I assume that's the reason), Turkish is also way up, which I'm happy to see.

For students in the second year of lyceum, French language used to be the most popular after English, but since last year now ranks fourth. 62.96 per cent chose English this year, down from last year’s 66.71 per cent, while only 12.65 per cent of students chose French, compared with 16.21 per cent last year.

Meanwhile the number of students choosing Turkish language is steadily increasing, with only one per cent in 2003, when it was first introduced into the curriculum, compared with today’s 7.76 per cent.

German and Russian remain the least popular at 2.81 per cent and 3.50 per cent respectively, while Italian remains extremely popular – consistently second only to English it is chosen by over one in two students.

So why is Italian so popular in Cyprus? ....I have no idea. Wikipedia in neither English, Italian, nor Spanish have any information on that either. I don't see anything in an automatic Google translation of the Greek page either.

Why is Italian so popular there?