This summer, you're welcome to the Scuola Italiana!

The 2014 session of the Scuola Italiana offered by Middlebury College, one of the oldest academic program in North America, will be held at Mills College, California, starting the next month of June.

This summer the courses designed for new students in the Master’s Program offer a broad view of Italian culture and literature. For returning students we have maintained high standards and a wide variety of courses on linguistic, theater, music, cinema, pedagogy, and literature. We have added new courses on culture, art history and civilization of Italy. This summer we will also have a new course in Mediterranean Studies that examines Mediterranean Culture in Dante’s Divine Comedy. This course can also be chosen for the literature and culture requirement.

In addition, we have new courses on Italian American Studies, one of the specializations offered for the Master program. The motivation and experience of the staff added to the expertise and dedication of faculty, drawn from European and North American institutions, ensure the maintenance of the School’s high standards at Mills.

What makes the Middlebury experience so unique is its long-standing observance of the Language Pledge, a written commitment made by each student to exclusively use the Italian language for the duration of the summer session. In spite of the considerable demand this formal pledge places on all, generations of students consider it a most valid and effective learning tool. Adherence to this rule is, therefore, strictly enforced at all times.

In 2014, the first four levels of language instruction will also emphasize various aspects of the multifaceted Italian culture. Special features, besides the afternoon conversation sessions, include workshops for students who want to sing, dance, act in the school play, and learn how to prepare Italian dishes, bread, pizza and pastry. We will also offer special workshops designed to help undergraduates and graduates to improve their diction, while learning new idiomatic expressions outside of the traditional classroom setting. Undergraduate students are required to participate in the School’s special film series presented by Director Roberta Torre, our Artist in Residence for this summer. They are also encouraged to take advantage of the weekly meetings on traditional and contemporary Italian cultural topics conducted by our faculty and special guests.

At the graduate level, two core courses (IT 6550 and IT 6602) will teach grammar and stylistics, emphasizing culture, writing and reading comprehension. Advanced culture and civilization courses, as well as graduate literature courses, will focus on a wide range of topics through various periods of Italian civilization: Italian Cinema, Art History, Renaissance, Contemporary Theater, Puccini, and the globalization of criminal organizations. Other courses will focus on literary critical theory, postwar poetry, Italian emigration in the West of the USA, Neorealism and Visual Arts, and Principles of Literary Communication.

A pedagogy course, including a practicum, will be dedicated to the use of technology in the classroom and methodology for second language instruction. The school is proud to announce that filmmaker Roberta Torre will be with us for two weeks (July 29  to Aug.8) and will lead workshops on script writing and film directing.

During the summer of 2014 the Italian School will again supplement its regular six-week graduate program with two intensive three-week sessions designed for teachers and graduate students of Italian, taught by professors of international prominence. Courses on the representation of Italian Contemporary Cinema, The American Dream in Italian Literature, Art History and the artistic and creative life of Oriana Fallaci, will be offered.

The summer session will offer a workshop on “La cucina e il vino d’Italia” to better understand the role that diet, cooking and wine have had through the centuries in shaping Italian culture.

A special feature of the 2014 session will be the presence on campus of many professors, writers and artists as “Special Guests in Residence.” Both students and faculty will benefit greatly from the many contributions that all the instructors and students will bring to the cultural life of the Italian School during their stay at Mills.

Over the course of the summer we will take advantage of Italian-American cultural sites, stores and museums located in nearby San Francisco. Visits to the following sites will be organized:

– Columbus and Broadway, the heart of North Beach;

– City Lights Bookstore, founded by Italian-American Lawrence Ferlinghetti;

– Liguria Bakery founded in 1911 by Ligurean Immigrants to taste la focaccia alla genovese

– Molinari Delicatessen (1896), an Italian-American gastronomic store run by the fourth generation of the founder family;