I have been fond of Esperanto for a number of years. It is almost as interesting a language as Latin is to me. It was invented by LL Zamenhof about 150 years ago and is a constructed language that gets its vocabulary from Latin, Greek, and Germanic languages. Its grammar is extremely straightforward and regular but it actually sounds fairly nice when spoken (and is fairly natural to use).
It has a reputation for only being used by geeky homosexual political progressives. I am not homosexual or politically progressive (more of a moderate in my mind) but I am geeky enough. The idea behind the language was to have an easy to use auxiliary language that everyone could learn and use. To me it is a good idea but people spend a lot of their time slamming on it. JRR Tolkien was a fan of the idea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto
People who are English speakers have a hard time understanding the need for an auxiliary language because in some sense they are in a privleged position where their language is in wide use.
Once upon a time Latin filled this role, but admittedly Latin is difficult for many people to pick up. I still do not feel like I have mastered the language and I have been studying it off and on for close to 20 years. Esperanto is actually easier to speak and understand than Italian by an order of magnitude. It took me about 20 hours of study to get good enough at it that I could read any Esperanto text, at this point I think I am probably conversant enough in it to use it routinely.
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