Italian (ROIT)

This is an introductory, first-year language sequence with equal focus on the four skills: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. An appreciation for Italian culture is also encouraged through readings and class discussion. The sequence 10101-10102 is to be followed by ROIT 20201 or ROIT 20215.

This is an introductory, first-year language sequence with equal focus on the four skills: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. An appreciation for Italian culture is also encouraged through readings and class discussion. The sequence 10101-10102 is to be followed by ROIT 20201 or ROIT 20215.

This is a six-credit hybrid introductory language course, which combines traditional classroom with on-line instruction. Students attend class with an instructor (MWF) and work on-line (T-TH). Equal emphasis is placed on spoken and written Italian. The course is followed by ROIT 20201 or 20215.

This is a one-credit interdisciplinary and experiential learning course offered through Summer Online in June 2022 to qualified Notre Dame students. This course prepares students to serve as language coaches for immigrants in Italy participating in the Italian for Immigrants non-credit training program. Students will tackle issues of immigration and foreign language pedagogy and will learn how to use their language knowledge for service to the underprivileged. This course is open to all language students who have reached a 102 level in their foreign language. Precedence will be given to students of Italian. Approximately 4 Notre Dame students will be hired to participate in this course. Students who are not hired will be prepared to support language training for immigrants.

ROIT 20111 is a six-credit hybrid Intensive course that combines second and third semesters of Italian language study, offering both traditional classroom instruction (MWF for 50 minutes each) and on-line work on the textbook Supersite on TTh. This course focuses on refining skills in all communicative aspects of Italian: reading, writing, listening and speaking. By the end of this intensive course, students will be able to better express themselves in Italian, and be culturally aware and engaged users of the language. ROIT 20111 is followed by ROIT 20202.

Welcome to ROIT 20201 - Intermediate Italian I. This is an intermediate language course focusing on oral and written production. It includes a review of some basic introductory-level grammar and transitions into more difficult features of Italian grammar and vocabulary. Students discuss and write about Italian cultural topics and current events. This course meets three hours per week on MWF and completes the remaining chapters of the Sentieri textbook and online platform.

ROIT 20202 is a fourth-semester Italian course that is designed to develop written and oral communication skills and to prepare students for upper-level courses in the Italian department. Throughout the semester, students will work towards obtaining linguistic fluency while exploring Italian culture through the films of some contemporary well-known directors. Each film will be presented in its historical and cultural context, which will provide us with the starting point of our class discussions. Cultural readings and literary excerpts drawing upon the themes of each unit and the themes presented in the films will be provided to supplement our discussion of the film.

This mini-course in Italian offers both informal and structured conversation practice. Conversation on Italian politics, society, and culture will be based on authentic materials. This course meets one hour per week for group discussions on contemporary issues and with guest speakers. Conducted in Italian. Recommended for students returning from Italy. Does not count towards Italian major or minor requirements.

At the turn of the twentieth century the US experienced one of the largest immigration waves in its history. Millions of Italian immigrants who made their way through Ellis Island at the time would leave a permanent imprint on the American landscape and social texture, just as the American experience would shape their identity. This course explores in an interdisciplinary way the many cultural aspects that define Italian-Americans, including religion, language, family structure and gender roles, traditions and celebrations, cuisine, political and social worldview, and artistic representations. The aim of this course is for students to analyze how these cultural facets created the Italian-American identity.

In the intricate and interconnected society of the Late Middle Ages in the Mediterranean Basin (12th-15th Centuries), the short story emerged as a dominant literary genre, transcending cultural and geographic boundaries. The Mediterranean’s bustling commercial networks served as a conduit for stories, knowledge, and people, bridging distant shores. During this era, Italians held sway as the Mediterranean’s foremost commercial and naval power, a dominance reflected in the multitude of short story collections written from the 12th to the 14th Centuries. Figures like Giovanni Boccaccio, Franco Sacchetti, and Giovanni Sercambi skillfully portrayed the sociological, geographical, historical, and psychological intricacies of this cultural crossroads. The short story explored diverse themes, including courtly love, the Crusades, the interplay of the three Monotheistic Religions, class struggles, varied perspectives on women’s roles from Spain to the Arabic domains, and encounters between different cultures. This genre provided a window into the era’s multifaceted facets. This course aims to delve into the historical tapestry of the multiethnic and multicultural Italian peninsula during the Late Middle Ages. Through Italian short stories, we will explore its cultures, geography, and traditions, gaining insights into this captivating period.

How and why do some of the roads taken by migrants (including refugees) lead to Rome and Italy? What are the challenges faced by migrants upon their arrival, and on their path to citizenship? How does civil society intervene to mitigate those challenges, and to facilitate mutual integration and engagement? What are the distinctive features of Roman lay and Catholic approaches to migration? The course addresses such questions, building on contemporary Rome both as a compelling case study and as a gateway to the causes, lived experiences, and consequences of global migrations. Migrants' reception and integration happens at the local level, and in interaction with residents and existing communities. Attention to the realities of the host civil society is therefore fundamental: migration is not an issue that can simply be delegated to experts, bureaucrats, and politicians. Students investigate how the experience of the city is at the same time the experience of globalization, embodied in older and new residents' everyday life in the built environment; and they appreciate situated social engagement and its potentialities.

A mini-course that prepares students accepted for study abroad in Notre Dame's programs in Italy. Students are prepared for various cultural and day-to-day challenges that await them in Italy. Class runs the second half of the semester.

This mini-course in Italian offers both informal and structured conversation practice. Conversation on a variety of topics such as Italian politics, society, and culture will be based on authentic materials. This course meets for group discussions on contemporary issues and with guest speakers. Conducted in Italian.

This independent study covers the intermediate second-year language sequence with equal focus on oral and writing skills. It includes a review of basic grammar and then transitions into more difficult features of Italian. Students learn to discuss and write about Italian cultural topics, current events, and literary texts.

This mini-course in Italian meets one hour per week for group discussions on varied contemporary issues in Italian culture, society, and politics. Conducted in Italian. Recommended for students in their third or fourth year of Italian. Does not count towards Italian major or minor requirements.

In this fifth-semester course you learn to analyze and understand works drawn from the major literary and artistic genres (lyric poetry, prose, theatre, epic, novel, film, opera, contemporary song). At the same time you will review and consolidate your grasp of the Italian language at an advanced level.

Italian literature and cinema have sought throughout the modern era to give testimony and bear witness to the crises of Italian history and society. This course aims to explore the role of the witness and the function of testimony in the representation of the crises of modern Italian society, including Fascism, the Mafia, and Terrorism. Analyzing literature and cinema that bear witness to the anti-Fascist Resistance, the Holocaust, the victims of Mafia violence, and Terrorist attacks, in this course, you will consider questions such as: Who is the witness of the event? Can a fictional character bear witness? What kind of testimony can the witness provide? Can testimony objectively define the event even as it reflects the subjective position of the witness? What are the meanings and the implications of the witness's narration? What role do we, as readers and viewers, have in the testimonial narrative? Together, we will reflect on the political, social, and ethical implications of testimony in the modern age. Among the texts and films we will consider in this course are works by Marco Bellocchio, Italo Calvino, Giacomo Debenedetti, Marco Tullio Giordana, Ada Gobetti, Liana Millu, Carlo Levi, Primo Levi, Leonardo Sciascia, and Michele Soavi

"Civilizations, Nations and Identities in Modern Europe aims to examine European modern history of civilizations, nationalism, religions, identities and ideologies through symbols and facts, in the field of social and cultural studies, with particular attention to many elements related to the social and cultural life of people, in their own environment. The cultural international history approach devotes particular attention to the period between 15th and 20th centuries, putting emphasis on the "delay of modernity" in Eastern Europe compared to West as well as to modernization factors (urbanization, centralization, cultural standardization, women empowerment)." Taught in English.

The class will explore the representation of Islam and Muslims in Italian culture from the Middle Ages to the present, and will investigate how the perception of Islam has influenced and shaped the Italian identity. The course will start with an examination of the representation of the Islamic "other" in medieval Italian literature, especially in Dante's Divine Comedy and Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron. Besides literature, we will also explore the impact of medieval Islamic architecture in Southern Italy, especially in Sicily. We will then deal with the Italian Renaissance and analyze both the relationship between Christian and Muslim characters in epic poems by authors such as Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso, and the representation of the mori ("Moors") in some of the most relevant Italian paintings of the 15th and 16th centuries. We will then investigate nineteenth-century Italian culture, through the analysis of some influential lyric operas of the time. Finally, we will deal with the representation of the relationship between Italians and Muslims in 20th- and 21st-century Italian films and narratives by directors and writers such as Mohsen Melliti, Igiaba Scego, and Amara Lakhous. Students will appreciate how Islam has deeply influenced Italian culture and how Italy, a center of Mediterranean culture, has been meaningfully linked with Islam throughout the centuries. Students will develop an understanding of Italy in a global context thereby increasing their intercultural competency. Taught in English.

By reading works that range from St. Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Creatures to the existential meditations of Giacomo Leopardi, this course explores how nature—and by extension, the natural order—was conceived and imagined within the Italian peninsula, from the Middle Ages to the Romantic period. We will trace the continuities and evolution of nature as a literary, philosophical, and theological idea and ask how past perspectives can inform our thinking about nature and its associated problems today. Questions to be pursued include: what is nature to begin with, and what parts of reality does it encompass? To what extent does it ground human ethics and craft? What trials and perils do humans face in their efforts to know, to master, and to care for, all things that move and grow? Do natural disasters and other forms of cosmic disarray threaten our belief in the order and goodness of the natural realm? And how do our representations of nature and its inhabitants shape our understanding of them and ultimately, of ourselves?

This course helps you to understand and interpret the most important works of medieval and Renaissance Italian literature, as well as painting, sculpture, architecture, and music, in their historical, social, and cultural context. We will analyze key texts from Cavalcanti, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Poliziano, and Ariosto, among others, and learn to appreciate key works of art and architecture by Duccio, Giotto, Ghiberti, Donatello, Brunelleschi, Alberti, Masaccio, Botticelli, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael, among others. The course is taught in Italian, and also aims to help you speak, understand, and write Italian with more confidence, accuracy, and ease. Counts as a Lit-Culture course; required for majors and supplementary majors in the Lit Culture concentration; this course or ROIT 30721 required for majors in the Italian Studies concentration. Cross-listed with MI 30577.

What do we mean by the word Love? Is it passion? Madness? Is it friendship? Can it exist only among human beings? Love shapes communities, can promote war or peace, and raises fundamental questions about life. In the pre-modern world, love was conceived as a force that moved the individual and governed not only the body but the entire universe. Love was God and the quest for the Absolute. Love was also desire and the cause of many problems. By reading literature from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (from early lyric to Dante's universal love, Petrarch's exploration of the self, Boccaccio's legitimation of female desire, Michelangelo's homoerotic poetry, Machiavelli's comic impulses, Vittoria Colonna's spiritual rhymes), along with philosophical, religious, and rhetorical texts on love (from Plato and Augustine to Andrea Cappellanus, Richard of St. Victor, and Marsilio Ficino), we will see what has changed and what has persisted, and ultimately come to understand what we mean when we talk about Love.

This course explores the rich traditions of travel writing about Italy, covering the Renaissance through contemporary times. Through readings of major authors—including Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), Lord Byron (1788-1824), Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851), Stendhal (1783-1842), Mark Twain (1835-1910), Henry James (1843-1916), Edith Wharton (1862-1937), D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), Mary McCarthy (1912-1989), and contemporary travel writers—students will explore how Italy has been imagined, experienced, and portrayed. Topics include cultural encounters in Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples, and Milan, the artistic inspirations drawn from Italy's immense architectural and artistic heritage, the Grand Tour, the evolution of travel to Italy as a literary genre, and cinematic interpretations of the journey to Italy theme ("Journey to Italy" [1954], directed by Roberto Rossellini; "Roman Holiday" [1953], directed by William Wyler, etc.). The course combines historical perspectives with close textual analysis, investigating how the journey to Italy has influenced European and global literary and cultural traditions.

Renowned for its rich past but full of contradictions that persist to the present day, Italy has one of the most fascinating histories and abundant cultures in the modern world. This course provides a unique perspective onto Italian modernity by exploring the wealth of Italy's modern and contemporary cultural production. We will focus on key issues that unveil the unique "spirit" of modern Italy, such as the weight of the past, the tension between political realism and idealism, the recurrence of social and political crises, immigration, revolution, and youth culture. We will investigate how issues of gender, class, race, identity, and faith have shaped Italian literature, film, and theatre in the modern age. Through the study of texts, films, and other media, the course seeks to understand the development of modern Italy and its future trajectory. Authors studied will include Dario Fo, Natalia Ginzburg, Eugenio Montale, Elsa Morante, Anna Maria Ortese, Luigi Pirandello, Igiaba Scego, and Elio Vittorini. This course is taught in Italian and satisfies the Ways of Knowing requirements for Advanced Language and Culture as well as Fine Arts and Literature.

This course offers a deep dive into the remarkable, yet frequently marginalized, works of women authors in Italian literature from the nineteenth century to contemporary times. How have these writers influenced discourses surrounding women’s emancipation and pressing social issues? What do their contributions reveal about women’s struggle to establish their voices, and claim their identity and power? Through our exploration of novels, poems, and short stories, we will uncover the unique perspectives and influences of these authors, highlighting how they have actively shaped the cultural landscape. The course will be conducted entirely in Italian, providing an immersive experience as we study works that have redefined the Italian literary canon.

Students participate in virtual engaged learning activities with organizations in the city of Rome in a variety of educational and institutional settings in keeping with their academic and disciplinary areas of interest. One initial, mid-term and final meeting with the instructor aimed at providing context for guided reflection on the students' experiences as interns with organizations in Rome. Work to be completed in Italian.

Specialized reading related to the student's area of study.

This course explores the work of Dante's Divine Comedy, looking at the Christian universe as poetry. Taught in English

Dante I and Dante II are an in-depth study, over two semesters, of the entire Comedy, in its historical, philosophical and literary context, with selected readings from the minor works (e.g., Vita Nuova, Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia). Dante I focuses on the <i>Inferno</i> and the minor works; Dante II focuses on the <i>Purgatorio</i> and <i>Paradiso</i>. Lectures and discussion in English; the text will be read in the original with facing-page translation. Students may take one semester or both, in either order.

Dante I and Dante II are an in-depth study, over two semesters, of the entire Comedy, in its historical, philosophical and literary context, with selected readings from the minor works (e.g., Vita Nuova, Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia). Dante I focuses on the <i>Inferno</i> and the minor works; Dante II focuses on the <i>Purgatorio</i> and <i>Paradiso</i>. Lectures and discussion in English; the text will be read in the original with facing-page translation. Students may take one semester or both, in either order.

In the Italian Middle Ages, vision was more than a physical process, it was a way of understanding the world, navigating society, and expressing devotion and desire. Fascinated by mystical experience but saturated with social conventions that sought to control as well as to captivate the gaze, theories and mythologies of vision shaped social life and self-expression, illuminating the centuries traditionally known as the “Dark Ages” with a rich discourse on sight and perception. This course explores the theme of vision across texts and images from medieval Italy, investigating whose visions got to be recorded. Readings include poetic, devotional, and scientific texts and the study selected visual artifacts from illuminated manuscripts to major fresco cycles, ecclesiastical artworks, and domestic decorations. In addition to exploring how ‘seeing’ shaped the medieval mind, students will uncover how authors and artists investigated the space between what could be seen and what could only be imagined.

In this course students will make a close and critical reading of Giovanni Boccaccio's collection of one hundred short stories, the Decameron. A founding work of Italian literature, recognized for centuries as its best example of prose writing, its author wanted it to be an ethical manual for critically understanding reality and its political, social, and religious tenets, under the appearance of a mere entertaining work. From the experience of the 1348 Black Plague to daily issues in protocapitalist Florence, from tales of magicians and enchanted gardens to tongue-in-cheek stories, from relationships between husband and wives, children and parents, to those between kings, sultans, and their subjects, Boccaccio's stories allow us to better understand our past, while challenging our views on the self, faith, society, and the other.

The turn of the twentieth century was a period of electrifying transformation. Yet, modernity – promising progress and innovation – also revealed its darker facets: inequality, division, and existential crisis. How did Italy adapt to this rapidly evolving world? This course delves into the vibrant cultural responses of the era, from the introspective works of Nobel Prize-winning authors to the bold, revolutionary manifestos of the avant-garde. We will examine Decadent and Modernist literature alongside disruptive movements like Futurism, uncovering how Italian writers and artists confronted literary and artistic conventions. Through textual and visual analysis, we will explore how the contradictions exposed by Modernism redefined the Italian cultural tradition and continue to resonate in contemporary times. Taught in Italian.

This course explores the history of Italian film from the silent era to the 1960s, an epoch stretching from Francesca Bertini's Assunta Spina to Federico Fellini's La dolce vita. At the center of this period is the age of Italian neorealism, when directors such as Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, and Luchino Visconti invented new ways of looking at the world that radically transformed the history of world cinema. Focusing their attention on issues and individuals that had gone unseen in Fascist and post-Fascist Italy, the neorealists challenged established norms by making the experiences of ordinary Italians increasingly visible, developing techniques for representing reality that continue to influence filmmakers across the globe. We will analyze how questions of class, faith, gender, identity, and ideology intersect on screen as Italian directors explore and attempt to intervene in a rapidly transforming modern world. With a filmography featuring both masterpieces of world cinema and cult classics, this course will investigate how the quest to capture reality reshaped every genre of Italian film, including action & adventure, comedy, crime, documentary, melodrama, mystery, thriller and more. The course is taught in English and all films will have English subtitles.

This course begins in the 1960s, when Italy stood at the center of the film world, and traces the history of Italian cinema to the present day. We will focus on the heyday of Italian auteurs – Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, and Pier Paolo Pasolini – examining how each brought a singular vision to the collective medium of cinema. Working against the hegemony of Hollywood, Italian filmmakers in the twentieth century created new forms of representation that inspired audiences worldwide. They continue to do so in the new millennium, building on the innovations of illustrious predecessors like Bertolucci and Pontecorvo, Wertmüller and Cavani to reveal new realities to moviegoers across the globe. We will analyze how questions of class, faith, gender, identity, and ideology intersect on screen as Italian directors seek both to expose and to recreate the illusions by which we live. With a filmography featuring both masterpieces of world cinema and cult classics, this course will investigate how pioneering Italian directors reshaped every genre of film, including action & adventure, comedy, crime, documentary, melodrama, mystery, thriller, horror, and more. The course is taught in English and all films will have English subtitles.

This course explores the construction and development of the Italian cinematic realist tradition from the silent era to the early 1970s, although its primary focus is on the period 1934-1966, which stretches from the appearance of Blasetti's openly fascist "historical" reconstruction, La vecchia guardia, to Pasolini's eccentric exercise in left-wing commitment, Uccellacci e uccellini, with its mix of expressionist and hyper-realist techniques. At the centre of this period are found some of Italy's most highly regarded films made by directors, such as Vittorio DeSica, Roberto Rossellini, and Luchino Visconti, who belonged to the neo-realist movement (1945-53). These filmmakers rejected escapist cinema and tried to make films that examined the contemporary experiences of ordinary Italians. As well as analyzing the films in themselves, the course examines the formal and ideological continuities and differences between neo-realist films and their silent and fascist predecessors. In a similar way, it analyzes neo-realism's impact on later filmmakers, such as Federico Fellini, Pietro Germi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gillo Pontecorvo, Dino Risi, and Francesco Rosi, who attempted to develop new versions of cinematic realism. Finally, the course aims to locate the films in their historical and cultural contexts and to address theoretical issues arising from the concept of "realism."

In this course, we will explore different ways of approaching the work of literary translation as we practice the art of translation itself. Practicing translation will allow us to improve our linguistic abilities in reading, writing, and speaking and will increase our intercultural competencies. Translation requires not only a comprehension of the relationship between two languages and their related cultures but also a linguistic and literary analysis of texts at multiple levels: from the nuances of the single word to the structure of a sentence or text to the possible meanings of the translated text. We will examine questions of register, tone, style, rhythm, rhyme, and meter in prose and verse texts from the Middle Ages to the contemporary era. Taught in Italian.

In this seminar we will investigate how Fascism emerged in Italy in the twentieth century, and how some Italians resisted the rise of totalitarianism. Reflecting on the role of culture throughout Italy's "difficult modernity," we will examine how leading artists and intellectuals worked to support or to combat the Italian dictatorship. Against the backdrop of the historical crises that both preceded and outlasted the Fascist period, we will engage with Italian literature, cinema, theatre, and art in order to evaluate the complex relationships between culture and power. Authors studied include Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, and Cesare Pavese. Filmmakers studied include Bernardo Bertolucci, Vittorio De Sica, and Roberto Rossellini. Course is taught in Italian

Primo Levi has been called "a major, universally recognized, icon in Holocaust literature" (Geerts), indeed "the witness-writer par excellence," because "his narrative, poetry and essays about his time in Auschwitz are among the most widely read and most widely lauded of all writings on the Holocaust" (Gordon). Levi was this and more: witness and storyteller, scientist and writer, he was among the greatest authors and moral authorities of the twentieth century. In this course, taught in Italian, we will read Levi's first and most famous work, Se questo - un uomo (If This is a Man, 1947), a masterpiece and milestone in the Italian tradition, in which Levi recounts his internment in Auschwitz. With Levi, we will ask what it means to live, what it means to be human, in and after the Nazi death camps. With Levi, too, we will broaden our exploration to address vital questions of faith, identity, meaning, truth, responsibility, love, friendship, freedom, diversity, survival, science, and salvation as we read selections from such fundamental works as La tregua (The Truce, 1963); Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table, 1975); Lillit e altri racconti (Moments of Reprieve, 1978); and I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved, 1986). Throughout the course we will also make use of materials from the Primo Levi Collection of Notre Dame's Hesburgh Library, one of the world's foremost collections dedicated to the study of Primo Levi.

This course examines how Italian culture has imagined, internalized, and engaged with the African-American struggle for freedom and equality from the nineteenth century to the present day. Exploring a range of texts and films by Italian and African-American authors, we will consider how they intersect to construct a discourse of solidarity, of common cause and a common front across continents and cultures. We will analyze and contextualize this discourse as it is made manifest across the modern history of Italy, from the Risorgimento to the First World War, from Fascism to Resistance, from 1968 to the Years of Lead, and into the new Millennium. Taught in English.

Students of the Italian language are eligible to sign up for an additional single credit discussion section as part of the Languages across the Curriculum (LAC) initiative in the College of Arts and Letters. Choosing this option means that students will read a canto per week of the Comedy in Italian and meet once a week with a section leader who will guide a discussion in Italian and grade some brief writing assignments. The LAC discussion section in Italian associated with this course will be graded on a pass/fail basis and credited to the student's transcript.

Students with Italian enrolled in Dante II have the option of also enrolling in a one-credit un/satisfactory Languages Across the Curriculum section, which will meet one hour per week to read and discuss selected passages or cantos in Italian.

Specialized reading related to the student's area of study.

This course is designed with the purpose of allowing students to engage in an individual or small group study under the direction of a departmental faculty member.

This course may cover an in-depth study of a particular author, theme, genre, or century. In addition to primary texts, some critical material will be required reading. This course culminates in a substantial research paper.