Benvenuti Sabrina, Sebastian, Gabriele e Stefania!

20 Jun 2023 1:12 PM | Anonymous

We are delighted to introduce four new team members who recently joined the ICC family:

Sabrina Infante, Director of the Youth School
Sabrina called Florence home for almost 15 years, and continues to travel there regularly. She has also lived in Verona and Venice, and has family in the Naples area. Sabrina appreciates the wide variety of regional culture in Italy, and loves sharing her knowledge and passion with her students. She has taught Italian language and culture for over 20 years at all levels. She began teaching at a nursery school in Italy, and later taught high school and university in the Boston area. After completing a Doctorate in Modern Languages, Sabrina moved to Minnesota in 2017 with her husband Paolo and their son Luca. Sabrina also taught at the ICC Youth School when her son was younger, and is delighted to return this time in the role of Director of the Youth School.

Sebastian Rivera, Director of Events
Sebastian is a multimedia artist and community leader, of Puerto Rican, Italian descent. He lived the majority of his childhood in Italy, in which he attended all of elementary and middle school, his family is from Abruzzo. Sebastian enjoys visiting his childhood family home in the outskirts of L'Aquila as often as possible. He has organized at local and national level for the past 8 years in different capacities, such as grassroot organizer, national trainer and legislative lobbyist. His public art focuses on the collaborative process with marginalized communities in order to depict their aspirations and fantasies. He hopes that his art and leadership will challenge and encourage others to think critically of their individual power.

Gabriele Angieri, Administrative Assistant
Gabriele has lived and worked as a Project Manager in the Twin Cities for over 30 years for several Minnesota based corporations, recently retiring to pursue his passion of acting professionally in theatre and film. The child of Italian Immigrants from the Campania region of Italy, Gabriele learned to speak English from watching television as a toddler in NYC. In his free time, Gabriele enjoys spending time with his immediate and extended family, traveling and working on home improvement projects.

Stefania Padalino, Instructor
Stefania was born in Catania, Sicily, and lived in

several places in Italy, including Naples, Verona, Vicenza, Tivoli, and Pisa. She also lived in several cities in the United States, and recently worked on an U.S. Army base in South Korea. Stefania holds a diploma in Early Child Development, a teaching certificate from the Italian Ministry of Education in Vicenza, and a Bachelor of Arts in Graphic Design from Oregon State University. After working for several years as a Graphic Designer, she looks forward to teaching Italian at ICC!

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Week of Italian Language in the World / Settimana della lingua italiana nel mondo.

17 Oct 2022 3:57 PM | Anonymous

October 17-23 is the Week of Italian Language in the World / Settimana della lingua italiana nel mondo. Watch the video: https://youtu.be/oosQsimAj58

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Il caffè di oggi. Beppe Fenoglio: writer, translator and lover of the English language and existentialism .

13 Oct 2022 3:33 PM | Anonymous

Beppe Fenoglio: writer, translator and lover of the English language and existentialism

Beppe Fenoglio (1922-1963) belongs to a select group of Italian writers who wrote about the struggle against fascism and the German occupation of Italy during WWII. Commonly referred to as Resistenza, this period begins with the end of Italy’s alliance with Hitler’s Germany and the armistice with France and England (September 8, 1943) and ends in May 1945. The men and women who fought in the Resistance were called partigiani and partigiane. Among those who wrote about this historically significant period were Cesare Pavese (La Casa in collina), Ada Gobetti (Diario partigiano), Italo Calvino (Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno), Elio Vittorini (Uomini e no), and Renata Viganò (L’Agnese va a morire).

Fenoglio was born in the town of Alba in the province of Cuneo in the northwestern region of Piedmont, an area famous for the production of wines such as Barolo and Barbaresco. This hilly area called Langhe – a dialect form of the Italian word lingue or ‘tongues’ - figures often in the landscapes surrounding Fenoglio’s stories.

In 2014 UNESCO included the Langhe among the World Heritage locations.

Fenoglio published several short stories. His most well-known collection I ventitrè giorni di Alba (Einaudi 1952; The Twenty Three Days of the City of Alba, 2002) includes twelve short stories related to the capture and subsequent loss of his hometown Alba: “Alba la presero in duemila il 10 ottobre e la persero in duecento il 2 novembre dell'anno 1944” ("Two thousand Italian partisans took the city of Alba on October 10, 1944, and two hundred lost it to the Fascists on November 2”).

During his short lifetime, Fenoglio published La malora (Einaudi 1954; Ruin 1995) in which he portrays the arduous lives of farmers around his hometown and Primavera di bellezza (Einaudi 1959; Spring of Beauty) which narrates the experiences of Johnny, a military officer from Alba, who becomes a partigiano, mirroring Fenoglio’s own life. The title of the novella cites a line from the lyrics of the fascist anthem Giovinezza. His major novel Il partigiano Johnny was published by Einaudi posthumously in 1968 (Johnny the Partisan 1995). Una questione privata (Einaudi 1963; A Private Matter 1988) was published two months after Fenoglio’s death; it focuses on the friendship between two partisans in love with the same woman and was the basis for a movie directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (2018).

Fenoglio’s approach is often autobiographical but it became less and less so as his writing matured. A distinctive feature of his narrative approach is the detachment from an ideological or partisan perspective: Fenoglio portrays the men and the women of the Resistenza with their fears, weaknesses, and ambivalence. The influence of the philosophical theory of existentialism, espoused in Italy by Pietro Chiodi, a close friend of Fenoglio, is apparent in the clash between an ethics of rules and an ethics of responsibility. Fenoglio stresses the importance of the choices we make to realize the freedom that the French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre considered central to the human experience.

Fenoglio loved the English language so much that he said he wrote Primavera di Bellezza first in English before translating it in Italian. Fenoglio’s translations of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights also appeared in print posthumously

This year, the Centro Studi Beppe Fenoglio celebrates the 100 years of the author’s birth (March 1^st 1922) with many events until March 1^st 2023.

For a balanced and insightful discussion of Fenoglio’s literary production, see Tobias Jones’s recent essay.

Article written by Prof. Pieranna Garavaso

Picture Langhe - Vineyard landscape - Author: Valerio Li Vigni; Copyright: © Valerio Li Vigni