Italian Courses

Spring 2025

Beginner's Italian II
Subject associations
ITA 102

Further study of Italian grammar and syntax with increased emphasis on vocabulary, reading, and practice in conversation. Skills in speaking and writing (as well as understanding) modern Italian will also be further developed. Students will deepen the study of grammatical functions through the analysis of Italian culture and civilization.

Instructors
Daniele De Feo
Elisa Dossena
Sara Teardo
Intensive Intermediate and Advanced Italian
Subject associations
ITA 1027

Italian 102-7 is an intensive double credit course designed to help students develop an active command of the language by improving upon the five skills of speaking, listening, reading, writing and cultural competency in the interpretative, interpersonal, and presentational modes. The course emphasizes communication and grammatical structures through use of various forms of texts (literary, artistic, musical, cinematographic, etc.) in order to refine students' literacy.

Instructors
Anna Cellinese
Intensive Beginner's and Intermediate Italian
Subject associations
ITA 103

This course is an intensive beginning and intermediate language course that provides an introduction to the Italian language and culture. It covers the material presented in ITA 101 and ITA 102 and prepares students to enroll in ITA 107 or ITA 108. Activities and interactions provide the opportunity to develop intermediate speaking, listening, and writing skills using language of a concrete, conversational nature.

Instructors
Anna Cellinese
Advanced Italian - Contemporary Society and Culture
Subject associations
ITA 108

The main goal of this course is to improve fluency in Italian and prepare students for upper level courses in the Italian program. Through film clips, film screenings, and readings, students will increase their understanding of grammatical functions and vocabulary applications, and improve their listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. The course has been enhanced with a digital platform, which allows students to actively interact with texts, films and each other through exercises and activities.

Instructors
Elisa Dossena
Music and Lyrics: Italy in the Eyes of its Pop Singers
Subject associations
ITA 225

Working at the crossroads of American influences and the tradition of political songs, Italian cantautori merge popular appeal and literary sophistication. For at least three generations, their songs have provided an engaged soundtrack to Italy's turbulent social, political and cultural transformations in the post-WWII years. As lyrics on the page, as music to be listened to, and as performances recorded in video, Italian canzoni d'autore are part of Italian history and identity today.

Instructors
Simone Marchesi
Topics in Medieval Italian Literature and Culture: Petrarch's Lyric Poetry
Subject associations
ITA 302

Considered by many the greatest scholar of his age, a successful rival to Dante, the revered teacher of Boccaccio, Petrarch bequeathed to posterity the most beautiful sonnets ever written in the Florentine vernacular. In the course, we will study the "Canzoniere", his collection of lyric poetry, a book which shaped the language of love in the European Renaissance, and a sample from his "Trionfi". The texts will be analyzed in relation to their historical and cultural context and for the impact they will have on modern European Literature.

Instructors
Simone Marchesi
Topics in Contemporary Italian Civilization: Africa in Italian Imagination
Subject associations
ITA 309 / AFS 309 / ECS 310

This course explores the colonial experience discussed by Italian writers who were in contact with Northern Africa between the 19th and the 20th centuries. This association between Italy and Africa has not been extensively developed neither within Italy or abroad, and it will be the primary focus of this course. The newly unified Italy (1861) looked at Africa as a colonial opportunity to expand its might and wealth. Writers soon embarked to places such as Alexandria and shared a unique perspective on Africa: they understood the continent not as a space to conquer and colonize, but rather as a surprisingly tolerant society in which to live.

Instructors
Pietro Frassica
Topics in Modern Italian Cinema: New Italian Cinema: History, Politics, and Society (in English)
Subject associations
ITA 310 / VIS 443

This course looks at the way Italy has expressed its historical, cultural, political, and social individuality in major cinematic works from the 1960's to the present. Directors such as Bertolucci, Tornatore, Benigni, Ozpetek, and Sorrentino offer a panorama of a generation of filmmakers that has contributed to the renewal of Italian cinema. Topics will be drawn from current issues, and will include the Holocaust and questions of memory, terrorism, political violence, migration, gender ideologies, the Mafia. Emphasis on film style and techniques.

Instructors
Gaetana Marrone-Puglia
Giovanni Riotta
The Literature of Gastronomy
Subject associations
ITA 319

What we do or do not eat and where we eat, are questions linked to anthropological and cultural matters. In a socio-political context, food, or the lack thereof, defines a society and its inadequacies. It becomes an agent of power, a metaphor for sex and gender, as well as a means of community. Whether as desire or transgression, whether corporal or spiritual - the representation of food is the depiction of Italian life. This course will examine translated Italian texts, along with visual art and film, in order to explore the function of eating, both as biological necessity as well as metaphor, within Italian society.

Instructors
Daniele De Feo
Pietro Frassica

Fall 2024

Beginner's Italian I
Subject associations
ITA 101

To develop the skills of speaking, understanding, reading and writing Italian. The main emphasis is on oral drill and conversation in the classroom. Aspects of Italian culture and civilization are integrated in the course. The Italian Language Program uses a new digital portfolio that serves as students' textbook. Through this medium, students are exposed to a more dynamic mode of language acquisition.

Instructors
Anna Cellinese
Daniele De Feo
Sara Teardo
Intermediate Italian
Subject associations
ITA 105

Italian 105 provides the opportunity to further develop Italian language proficiency in all three modes of communication: Interpersonal, Interpretive, and Presentational. Students will interact with various types of texts (literature, film, visual culture, music, interviews, etc.) and will develop the intercultural competency necessary to better understand Italian language and culture as a whole. At the end of ITA 105 students are ready to enroll in ITA 108.

Instructors
Anna Cellinese
Advanced Italian
Subject associations
ITA 107

This course analyzes Italian culture and cultural changes through products such as newspaper articles, essays, comic books, music, film, food, and visual artifacts in connection with Italian history and society. Italian 107 is intended to provide students with tools for communicating effectively in Italian in an informal and formal context, to move students along the proficiency spectrum toward a more advanced language level, and to promote a global awareness and cross-cultural understanding of contemporary Italian life and culture. Classes are conducted entirely in Italian.

Instructors
Elisa Dossena
Sara Teardo
Advanced Italian - Contemporary Society and Culture
Subject associations
ITA 108

The main goal of this course is to improve fluency in Italian and prepare students for upper level courses in the Italian program. Through film clips, film screenings, and readings, students will increase their understanding of grammatical functions and vocabulary applications, and improve their listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. The course has been enhanced with a digital platform, which allows students to actively interact with texts, films and each other through exercises and activities.

Instructors
Elisa Dossena
Italian Civilization Through the Centuries (LA)
Subject associations
ITA 220

This course is designed to give an overview of pivotal moments in Italian culture, such as the relationship between Church and Empire in the Middle Ages, Machiavelli's political theory during the Renaissance, and the rise and fall of Fascism in the 20th century. Through the examination of the most relevant intellectual, historic, and artistic movements and their main geographical venues, students will be able to acquire a comprehensive understanding of the development of Italian history and civilization.

Instructors
Daniele De Feo
Pietro Frassica
Topics in Medieval Italian Literature and Culture: Writing Latin in Late Medieval Italy (LA)
Subject associations
ITA 302 / LAT 302

The course focuses on the close reading in the original Latin of a wide selection of 13th and 14th Century Italian writers of hagiographic texts, Church documents, scientific inquiries, epic poetry, as well as of treatises about linguistics, poetics, ethics, and historiography. The course affords an opportunity to explore a representative selection of writings from Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, three canonical medieval Italian writers, whose success as vernacular authors often effaces their remarkable and remarkably successful Latin works.

Instructors
Simone Marchesi
Topics in 20th-Century Italian Literature: 20th Century Italian Fiction (LA)
Subject associations
ITA 308

The course's goal is to analyze the Modern movement in Italian fiction from 1900 to the present, particularly as it reflects various responses to social, political and cultural problems of the period. The following topics will be examined: Fascism in literature; literature of neo-realism and its relation with films, and neo-capitalism; the protest movement of the 1960s and '70s, and the new outlook for the '80s, '90s, and beyond.

Instructors
Pietro Frassica
Women in European Cinema: Gender and the Politics of Culture (CD or LA)
Subject associations
HUM 316 / COM 313 / ECS 374 / ITA 316

This course will provide the historical and theoretical background essential for understanding the evolution of women's film in European cinema. Particular attention will be paid to questions of sexual difference and to the challenges feminist and queer theory pose to a politics of identity in film. Students will explore and assess the ways cultural identity determines the cinematic representation of women, while receiving a solid grounding in the poetics of cinema as it developed across time, genres, and cultures.

Instructors
Maria A. DiBattista
Gaetana Marrone-Puglia
Seminar in Italian Literature and Culture: Modern Italian Theater: Performance, Spectacle, and the Social Scene (LA or SA)
Subject associations
ITA 401 / THR 408 / COM 469

The purpose of this course will be to explore the dynamics of spectacle and performance (artistic, political, sexual, anthropological) in representative plays by major Italian authors of the 20th century. A close analysis of works by the Futurists, Eleonora Duse, Pirandello, Fo, and Ovadia will enable us to address questions of a textual and critical nature related to contemporary social issues. Special attention will be given to the representation of individual and societal tensions, the imaging of the female voice, and the relations between the political and artistic imagination.

Instructors
Gaetana Marrone-Puglia

Spring 2024

Beginner's Italian II
Subject associations
ITA 102

Further study of Italian grammar and syntax with increased emphasis on vocabulary, reading, and practice in conversation. Skills in speaking and writing (as well as understanding) modern Italian will also be further developed. Students will deepen the study of grammatical functions through the analysis of Italian culture and civilization.

Instructors
Daniele De Feo
Max Matukhin
Sara Teardo
Intensive Intermediate and Advanced Italian
Subject associations
ITA 1027

Italian 102-7 is an intensive double credit course designed to help students develop an active command of the language by improving upon the five skills of speaking, listening, reading, writing and cultural competency in the interpretative, interpersonal, and presentational modes. The course emphasizes communication and grammatical structures through use of various forms of texts (literary, artistic, musical, cinematographic, etc.) in order to refine students' literacy.

Instructors
Anna Cellinese
Intensive Beginner's and Intermediate Italian
Subject associations
ITA 103

This course is an intensive beginning and intermediate language course that provides an introduction to the Italian language and culture. It covers the material presented in ITA 101 and ITA 102 and prepares students to enroll in ITA 107 or ITA 108. Activities and interactions provide the opportunity to develop intermediate speaking, listening, and writing skills using language of a concrete, conversational nature.

Instructors
Anna Cellinese
Advanced Italian - Contemporary Society and Culture
Subject associations
ITA 108

The main goal of this course is to improve fluency in Italian and prepare students for upper level courses in the Italian program. Through film clips, film screenings, and readings, students will increase their understanding of grammatical functions and vocabulary applications, and improve their listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. The course has been enhanced with a digital platform, which allows students to actively interact with texts, films and each other through exercises and activities.

Instructors
Elisa Dossena
The Italian Renaissance: Literature and Society (LA)
Subject associations
ITA 306

This course will introduce students to the basic trends and problems of Renaissance literature as the main source of our civilization. The major literary figures of the 16th-century Italian revival (such as Machiavelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Castiglione, Michelangelo, etc.) will be studied in relation to their time, the courts or the cities where they lived, and their seminal contributions to modern Europe culture including works of visual art, theater, and good living.

Instructors
Pietro Frassica
Fascism in Italian Cinema (HA)
Subject associations
ITA 312 / VIS 445

This course, conducted in English, is a study of Fascism through selected films from World War II to the present. Topics include: the concept of Fascist normality; Racial Laws; the role of women and homosexuals; colonialism; and the opposition of the intellectual left. Films include: Bertolucci's "The Conformist", Fellini's "Amarcord", Rossellini's "Rome Open City", Cavani's "Night Porter", and Wertmüller's "Seven Beauties". The approach is interdisciplinary and combines the analysis of historical themes with an in-depth cinematic reading of the films.

Instructors
Elisa Dossena
Gaetana Marrone-Puglia
The Literature of Gastronomy (LA)
Subject associations
ITA 319

What we do or do not eat and where we eat, are questions linked to anthropological and cultural matters. In a socio-political context, food, or the lack thereof, defines a society and its inadequacies. It becomes an agent of power, a metaphor for sex and gender, as well as a means of community. Whether as desire or transgression, whether corporal or spiritual - the representation of food is the depiction of Italian life. This course will examine translated Italian texts, along with visual art and film, in order to explore the function of eating, both as biological necessity as well as metaphor, within Italian society.

Instructors
Pietro Frassica

Fall 2023

Beginner's Italian I
Subject associations
ITA 101

To develop the skills of speaking, understanding, reading and writing Italian. The main emphasis is on oral drill and conversation in the classroom. Aspects of Italian culture and civilization are integrated in the course. The Italian Language Program uses a new digital portfolio that serves as students' textbook. Through this medium, students are exposed to a more dynamic mode of language acquisition.

Instructors
Anna Cellinese
Daniele De Feo
Sara Teardo
Intermediate Italian
Subject associations
ITA 105

Italian 105 is a one semester, intermediate language course, that focuses on oral and written communication, allowing students to build up their language proficiency from their previous knowledge of elementary Italian. The course content draws on different types of texts: visual, media, music, literature, and art. In addition, the course will develop the intercultural competency necessary to better understand Italian language and culture as a whole. At the end of ITA 105 students are ready to enroll in ITA 108.

Instructors
Anna Cellinese
Advanced Italian
Subject associations
ITA 107

This course analyzes Italian culture and cultural changes through products such as newspaper articles, essays, comic books, music, film, food, and visual artifacts in connection with Italian history and society. Italian 107 is intended to provide students with tools for communicating effectively in Italian in an informal and formal context, to move students along the proficiency spectrum toward a more advanced language level, and to promote a global awareness and cross-cultural understanding of contemporary Italian life and culture. Classes are conducted entirely in Italian.

Instructors
Daniele De Feo
Elisa Dossena
Sara Teardo
Advanced Italian - Contemporary Society and Culture
Subject associations
ITA 108

The main goal of this course is to improve fluency in Italian and prepare students for upper level courses in the Italian program. Through film clips, film screenings, and readings, students will increase their understanding of grammatical functions and vocabulary applications, and improve their listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. The course has been enhanced with a digital platform, which allows students to actively interact with texts, films and each other through exercises and activities.

Instructors
Elisa Dossena
Italian Civilization through the Centuries: Identity Crisis from Dante to the Present (LA)
Subject associations
ITA 224

What does it mean to have a crisis? How do we overcome one? This course explores the idea of crisis as a defining feature of Italian culture and history from Dante to the present, spanning the individual, political, and society. Through the examination of the most relevant intellectual, historic, and artistic movements, we study how crises have lead both to some of Italy's most spectacular achievements, and to the rise and fall of Fascism. This will allow us to reflect on today's personal and global crises, such as the atrocities of war and climate change.

Instructors
Andrea Capra
Gaetana Marrone-Puglia
Dante's 'Inferno' (LA)
Subject associations
ITA 303 / MED 303

Intensive study of the "Inferno", with major attention paid to poetic elements such as structure, allegory, narrative technique, and relation to earlier literature, principally the Latin classics. Course conducted in English in a highly-interactive format.

Instructors
Simone Marchesi
Risorgimento, Opera, Film (HA or LA)
Subject associations
ITA 314 / COM 387

This course will explore the ways in which national identity was imagined and implemented within Italian literature, culture, and cinema before, during, and after the period of Italian unification in the mid-XIX century. Examples are drawn from a wide range of literary, artistic and cultural media.

Instructors
Gaetana Marrone-Puglia
Cybernetics, Literary Ghosts and the Italian Way (LA or SA)
Subject associations
ITA 320

"Will we have a machine capable of replacing the poet and the author?" the Italian writer Italo Calvino asked in 1967, predicting that computers would write "literature." In 1962 poet Nanni Balestrini instructed a computer to write a poem eager to hear "the voice of the machine." Thanks to ChatGPT, GPT3 and AI novels, non-fiction books, media, music and videos are composed through algorithms in a digital Renaissance. How do we instruct a computer to write a novel? Should we use algorithms or machine learning? Class will experiment with machine writing, its role on disinformation and the polarization of politics.

Instructors
Giovanni Riotta

Spring 2023

Beginner's Italian II
Subject associations
ITA 102

Further study of Italian grammar and syntax with increased emphasis on vocabulary, reading, and practice in conversation. Skills in speaking and writing (as well as understanding) modern Italian will also be further developed. Students will deepen the study of grammatical functions through the analysis of Italian culture and civilization.

Instructors
Anna Cellinese
Intensive Intermediate and Advanced Italian
Subject associations
ITA 1027

Italian 102-7 is an intensive double credit course designed to help students develop an active command of the language by improving upon the five skills of speaking, listening, reading, writing and cultural competency in the interpretative, interpersonal, and presentational modes. The course emphasizes communication and grammatical structures through use of various forms of texts (literary, artistic, musical, cinematographic, etc.) in order to refine students' literacy.

Instructors
Elisa Dossena
Sara Teardo
Intensive Beginner's and Intermediate Italian
Subject associations
ITA 103

This course is an intensive beginning and intermediate language course that provides an introduction to the Italian language and culture. It covers the material presented in ITA 101 and ITA 102 and prepares students to enroll in ITA 107 or ITA 108. Activities and interactions provide the opportunity to develop intermediate speaking, listening, and writing skills using language of a concrete, conversational nature.

Instructors
Daniele De Feo
Advanced Italian - Contemporary Society and Culture
Subject associations
ITA 108

The main goal of this course is to improve fluency in Italian and prepare students for upper level courses in the Italian program. Through film clips, film screenings, and readings, students will increase their understanding of grammatical functions and vocabulary applications, and improve their listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. The course has been enhanced with a digital platform, which allows students to actively interact with texts, films and each other through exercises and activities.

Instructors
Elisa Dossena
Introduction to Italy Today
Subject associations
ITA 208

This course is designed to familiarize the student with major features of contemporary Italy and its culture. Its purpose is to develop the student's ability to communicate effectively in present-day Italy. The course emphasizes Italian social, political, and economic institutions, doing so through the analysis of cultural and social differences between Italians and Americans in such everyday concerns as money, work and leisure.

Instructors
Pietro Frassica
Topics in Medieval Italian Literature and Culture: Dante Pop: The Divine Comedy in Popular Culture (LA)
Subject associations
ITA 302

A cultural icon no less than a cultural product, Dante's imaginative universe enjoys a pervasive presence in popular culture. Matching a reading of the Inferno with analysis of different media products, the course studies Dante's presence in genres as different as graphic novels and theater productions, advertisements and sci-fi narratives, rock and rap music, video-and board games, satirical vignettes and political speeches in the Italian and Anglo-American world.

Instructors
Simone Marchesi
Topics in Contemporary Italian Civilization: Weird Italy (CD or LA)
Subject associations
ITA 309 / COM 386 / ECS 318 / HUM 327

Italy, homeland of poets, saints, navigators, and... weirdos. In this class, we turn stereotypes that depict Italy as the land of beauty and classicism inside out, and focus instead on how distinctively weird much of Italy's modern artistic production is. Is the Italian polymath Giacomo Leopardi the unsung grandfather of weird fiction? Did Giorgio De Chirico and Italo Calvino influence Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation? Leveraging theorizations on the topic as well as transmedial and transnational perspectives, we study what it means for something to be weird, why weird art fascinates us, and if we should all try to be weirder.

Instructors
Andrea Capra
Fascism in Italian Cinema (HA)
Subject associations
ITA 312 / VIS 445

This course, conducted in English, is a study of Fascism through selected films from World War II to the present. Topics include: the concept of Fascist normality; Racial Laws; the role of women and homosexuals; colonialism; and the opposition of the intellectual left. Films include: Bertolucci's "The Conformist", Fellini's "Amarcord", Rossellini's "Rome Open City", Cavani's "Night Porter", and Wertmüller's "Seven Beauties". The approach is interdisciplinary and combines the analysis of historical themes with an in-depth cinematic reading of the films.

Instructors
Elisa Dossena
Gaetana Marrone-Puglia
The Literature of Gastronomy (LA)
Subject associations
ITA 319

What we do or do not eat and where we eat, are questions linked to anthropological and cultural matters. In a socio-political context, food, or the lack thereof, defines a society and its inadequacies. It becomes an agent of power, a metaphor for sex and gender, as well as a means of community. Whether as desire or transgression, whether corporal or spiritual - the representation of food is the depiction of Italian life. This course will examine translated Italian texts, along with visual art and film, in order to explore the function of eating, both as biological necessity as well as metaphor, within Italian society.

Instructors
Daniele De Feo
Pietro Frassica
Imagining the Mediterranean In Literature and Film: Itineraries Traditions Ordeals (CD or LA)
Subject associations
COM 322 / ECS 372 / ENG 282 / ITA 324

Exploring literary texts and films that foreground the benefits, but also the ordeals of transnational migration and the traffic in peoples, goods, and ideas throughout the Mediterranean region, with particular stress on contemporary works and issues. Particular attention will be paid to women's experience of the Mediterranean as a realm of adventure as well as the subjection imposed by patriarchal customs, war, and colonization.

Instructors
Maria A. DiBattista
Gaetana Marrone-Puglia

Fall 2022

Beginner's Italian I
Subject associations
ITA 101

To develop the skills of speaking, understanding, reading and writing Italian. The main emphasis is on oral drill and conversation in the classroom. Aspects of Italian culture and civilization are integrated in the course. The Italian Language Program uses a new digital portfolio that serves as students' textbook. Through this medium, students are exposed to a more dynamic mode of language acquisition.

Instructors
Anna Cellinese
Daniele De Feo
Sara Teardo
Intermediate Italian
Subject associations
ITA 105

Italian 105 provides the opportunity to further develop Italian language proficiency in all three modes of communication: Interpersonal, Interpretive, and Presentational. Students will interact with various types of texts (literature, film, visual culture, music, interviews, etc.) and will develop the intercultural competency necessary to better understand and embrace Italian language and culture as a whole. At the end of ITA 105 students are ready to enroll in ITA 108.

Instructors
Sara Teardo
Advanced Italian
Subject associations
ITA 107

This course analyzes Italian culture and cultural changes through products such as newspaper articles, essays, comic books, music, film, food, and visual artifacts in connection with Italian history and society. Italian 107 is intended to provide students with tools for communicating effectively in Italian in an informal and formal context, to move students along the proficiency spectrum toward a more advanced language level, and to promote a global awareness and cross-cultural understanding of contemporary Italian life and culture. Classes are conducted entirely in Italian.

Instructors
Daniele De Feo
Elisa Dossena
Advanced Italian - Contemporary Society and Culture
Subject associations
ITA 108

The main goal of this course is to improve fluency in Italian and prepare students for upper level courses in the Italian program. Through film clips, film screenings, and readings, students will increase their understanding of grammatical functions and vocabulary applications, and improve their listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. The course has been enhanced with a digital platform, which allows students to actively interact with texts, films and each other through exercises and activities.

Instructors
Elisa Dossena
Italian Civilization Through the Centuries (LA)
Subject associations
ITA 220

This course is designed to give an overview of pivotal moments in Italian culture, such as the relationship between Church and Empire in the Middle Ages, Machiavelli's political theory during the Renaissance, and the rise and fall of Fascism in the 20th century. Through the examination of the most relevant intellectual, historic, and artistic movements and their main geographical venues, students will be able to acquire a comprehensive understanding of the development of Italian history and civilization.

Instructors
Daniele De Feo
Pietro Frassica
Topics in Medieval Italian Literature and Culture: Paradigmi di una Pandemia: Boccaccio's Decameron (LA)
Subject associations
ITA 302

Conceived in the aftermath of the plague of 1348 and as a response to the devastation it produced, Boccaccio's "Decameron" is a complex set of interconnected stories, linked by the author's convictions about literature and the role it plays in a community. Our reading of selected novellas in the original language will offer a point of entry into several traditions in Italian and European culture and an opportunity to reflect critically on the present.

Instructors
Simone Marchesi
Topics in 20th-Century Italian Literature: 20th Century Italian Fiction (LA)
Subject associations
ITA 308

The course's goal is to analyze the Modern movement in Italian fiction from 1900 to the present, particularly as it reflects various responses to social, political and cultural problems of the period. The following topics will be examined: Fascism in literature; literature of neo-realism and its relation with films, and neo-capitalism; the protest movement of the 1960s and '70s, and the new outlook for the '80s, '90s, and beyond.

Instructors
Pietro Frassica