School AMICI - An Italian Haven in Cincinnati

by Jan Angilella

After studying Italian in Italy last year, one of the first things I did when I returned home was seek out ways to maintain my progress. I continued the lessons with the school in Italy via Skype, but I also returned to the Italian language school here in Cincinnati, School Amici.

The two hours a week at the school with the native Italian instructors encompassed grammar and fun conversation. I needed both as I continue my quest to keep improving and eventually, maybe, hopefully, get close to fluency. But I was curious about why other students were there.

Why were they studying this most beautiful language?  I found varied reasons but a few in common: a desire to learn their family’s native tongue, wanting to speak with the locals during an upcoming trip to Italy or a re-connection to ancestors.

“It’s a good way to keep in touch with my heritage in the middle of Germany here on the Ohio River,” said my fellow student Louis Solimine.  He’s originally from Brooklyn but has been in Cincinnati for 35 years.

Mike Trotta, Louis Solimine, Dominic Lemma and Eric Lombardo

Solimine, fellow students Eric Lombardo, Dominic Lemma and Michael Trotta have been studying Italian together for eight years at School Amici.  All four have family roots in Italy.

Lombardo said after studying the language and then going to Italy makes a difference in the experience. “I knew how to say things,” he said. “It adds a whole extra dimension to being there if you can speak the language. It’s a whole other layer of culture.”

Trotta wants to learn to speak the perfect Italian, since he grew up speaking and hearing the language spoken with a dialect. “It’s a whole different mindset when I’m there,” he said. “You get gun shy about not speaking correctly but you have to get over that. I can get by day to day but it’s the longer conversations that are difficult.”

Sue Zurface

Student Sue Zurface, a cyclist, attends classes so she can converse with her fellow bike riders when she returns to Italy for races. During a trip in 2014, she became fast friends with the owners and mechanics of a bike shop and went on a ride with one of the mechanics. He spoke no English, she spoke no Italian. “Our communication consisted of horrific attempts at each other’s mother tongue and a lot of hand signals,” she wrote in an e-mail.

She found School Amici in an Internet search and quickly advanced in the second level class. Her plan to return to Italy that fall hit a snag when she began treatment for stage III leukemia.  She went anyway, armed with the ability to converse at a basic level on most topics. “By the end of the week, the language no longer seemed foreign to me,” she said.

Zurface has since been back twice to Italy, once to ride the “Gran Fondo” race in the city of Cassino.  She’s still fighting the leukemia battle, she says, but she’s on a “good path.” Soon she hopes to go back and visit Calabria, the region of her roots.

School Director Michele Alonzo

School Amici was founded in 1984 by Federico Bilotti.  “I decided that the time was appropriate to provide the Cincinnati community with the opportunity to experience the Italian culture,” he wrote me in an e-mail.  Bilotti now lives in Aprilia, Italy, a small town in the Lazio region. He wrote that the idea for a school was born from second-generation Italians who wanted to get closer to their cultural roots.

Current school director Michele Alonzo, who’s been with the school for 25 years, the last 18 as director, said it’s rewarding to still see so much interest in Italian. “Italian isn't an international language. It’s not something you can speak everywhere you go, but it’s still one of the most fascinating ways of communicating.”

Some of the more common reasons students enroll in the classes are the pleasure of learning a new language and for travel, if they’re planning a trip to Italy.  “They want to learn more than ‘Buongiorno’ ‘Come stai?’,” Alonzo said. “They like to participate and when they’re there, they want to show interest in the language.”

Today the enrollment averages 40 students, divided in four levels from Beginning to Advanced. The two-hour classes are held once a week at the Academy of World Languages in O’Bryonville for ten weeks.

Valeria Di Cristofaro

Instructor Valeria Di Cristofaro told me how much teaching here and sharing her experiences from home helped her deal with homesickness.  “When I came here, I was far from my family, my home in Italy. The students helped to take away some of the nostalgia I was feeling.”

There are several students with family origins from Italy and they enroll in the school to reconnect with those roots.  “The students want to go there and discover where their ancestors came from,” Alonzo said. There are others who want to get acquainted with the language before they get to Italy and have to communicate with locals in a small town, where nobody speaks English.

And of course, there are some who like to learn Italian because of what the language and the country still represent to people.  “The dream to live la dolce vita,” Alonzo said. “They really feel like Italians have the best life in the world. The food, the weather, the art, panoramic views. They think about the paradise of Italy.” He continued, “Learning the language helps them feel a little bit more Italian. They feel a part of that world.”

School Amici has relationships with “sister schools” in Italy, in Siena, Sorrento, Todi and Recanati.  If you really want to speak with the locals, get a basis here in Cincinnati and then go to Italy and enroll for a week. You can’t do much worse than living in the middle of Tuscany or on the seaside of Sorrento for a vacation.

I think Trotta has the right idea: he wants to just go rent a house in a small town in Italy, where no one speaks English and live there for six months. Sounds like a pretty good plan to me! Andiamo!

Want to learn Italian? The next session starts Wednesday, September 28 at 6:30pm.

Go to http://www.schoolamici.com for information.  The school is donating 10 percent of class fees to the Italian Red Cross Relief Fund for the victims of the earthquake that struck Italy on August 24.

Some of the School AMICI students with their native teachers

Learn Italian from the Back of a Box

I made a pretty wild purchase at the supermercato yesterday: a boxed mix called Torta della Nonna and it's cooling on the counter as I write.  It was my first and I learned a lot more than just how to make a cake.

It looked so easy on the shelf!

Very quickly, the preparation became a joint project, me reading the 16 steps of directions out-loud to Michele who would then correct my pronunciation.  A lot of the words were ones I had never used or heard before: serbandone (laying aside part of it), miscela (mix), bucherellare (to poke holes). This was no American -" add 2 eggs, half-a-cup of water and put it in the oven" kind of mix.

One of the steps that puzzled me was what to do with the mix they told me to save, ending up with an extra couple of tablespoons.  We finally figured out it was to dust the counter-top (yes, the counter top - Italian companies assume that specialized equipment is not necessary and that counter tops are clean) where I would roll out the pastry for the top of the cake.  That's when I realized the average Italian housewife does not keep flour on hand as a staple.  She buys her bread at the panificio, her pastries at the pasticceria, her focaccia at the focacceria.  Why keep extra flour around?  Space in the single food cabinet in the typical Italian kitchen is limited enough already.

Of course there was the constant need to mentally convert back and forth from the metric system.  This is easier in Italy than when I am at home trying to fix an Italian recipe in my Cincinnati kitchen - but it's still intimidating to see everything on the back of the box in grams:  350 g di miscela base per l'impasto, 10 g di pinoli,  forno a gas preriscaldato a 180 centigradi.  

Not big, but everything we Americans need (dishwasher & microwave).
When you move in  the only things in the kitchen are the tiles and pipes sticking out of the walls.

Maybe the weirdest observation I made during my cake-baking Italian lesson was the way a foreign culture can get inside your brain and change how you solve problems.  I got to the step about mattarello and realized we didn't have a rolling-pin.  My natural instinct in Cincinnati would have been to run to the store and buy one.  But not  here.   It didn't even occur to me.  See that clear glass bottle in the dish drainer, one we usually take to the man at the "Vini Sfusi" store to fill with wine?  It was perfect!

Mamma mia!  I'd hate to see how much time it would take Grandma to make this cake without the convenience of a mix.

How Studying Abroad Changed the Way I Travel

by Melinda Cebula Harris  (current student at School Amici)

For three or four years I was a tourist. I would pack my bags and jet set to all the “must-see” locations of the world. Soon, I found my place of choice, Italy. I would go every summer and sightsee. It was wonderful, but on the crowded streets of Rome or Venice with my camera in one hand and my city map in the other, it was impossible to become acquainted with the true culture of the country. This is when I decided to learn the Italian language.

Melinda in Todi

My studies began close to home in Cincinnati, Ohio at School AMICI. I immediately felt at ease with my patient and gentle teacher from Calabria, Gerardo. Gerardo would entertain the class with stories of his Italian childhood, while teaching us the Italian ABCs, numbers, and basic grammar. School AMICI created a solid foundation, which for me was the key to my success in my subsequent studies abroad.

In 2012 I chose Todi, a tiny town perched upon a tall two-crested hill in central Italy, as my place of study. Experience had taught me that the smaller towns offered the most authentic experience. For three weeks I studied both privately and in whole group at La Lingua La Vita. My confidence and ability to speak Italian improved daily with the guidance of my teachers. What I loved most about La Lingua La Vita was the opportunities they created to interact with the local community. Through the school, I attended weekly cooking lessons hosted in the countryside home of Rita, a local Italian famed for her cooking. Rita spoke no English, so even when I was in doubt or my Italian confidence wavered; I had to rely on my language skills. This created many laughable moments as hand gestures and air drawings appeared to be games of charades rather than a group of girls learning the simple secrets of delicious Italian cuisine. 

Cooking with Rita

My mother, Linda, also a School AMICI student, had traveled with me to Todi. At first she was going to take the lazy lifestyle, taking a late morning espresso or a passeggiata (stroll) to the market… but something about La Lingua La Vita caught her attention and she enrolled on the very first day of classes. To my mother’s delight, her daily private lessons were held at a charming local café specializing in delicious fresh fruit gelato and strong Italian coffee. Her teacher, Antonella, quickly became a dear friend to both my mother and me inviting us to see the home she and her husband were building and to the church she so passionately loved. Our friendship with Antonella and her family continues to this day.

Melinda and her mother, with Antonella and daughter

Studying abroad changed my passion for traveling. I was no longer excited to see the sights but to know the Italian people and their way of life. These moments, these connections, these invitations into the lives of the Italian locals are exactly what had been missing in all my years of traveling as a tourist. It was the commonality of the Italian language that made these connections possible, and for this I will always be thankful for School AMICI and La Lingua La Vita.

 

A few notes of interest:

Todi has, by far, some of the most beautiful views I have seen in all of Italy. If possible, choose an apartment with a view of the countryside. As an added bonus if you travel in July, when Todi hosts an international ballooning competition, the sky is especially beautiful as colorful hot air balloons paint the sky.

If Italian cuisine temps your palate, you will not be disappointed. For such a small town I was delighted by the quality of all my dining experiences. Antica Osteria della Valle was my favorite.

And finally, I found Todi very friendly for people who might have trouble walking long distances. The school, small grocery, restaurants, and shops are within close proximity of each other, making this an ideal location for people of all ages.

Music and Language

by Michele Alonzo

There are a lot of similarities between learning how to play an instrument and how to speak a foreign language.

I learned how to play guitar by myself when I was a teen ager. At that time I had a lot of passion and willingness to improve, so every day I played more and more my favorite songs and music, sometimes by myself, sometimes with friends.

I developed more skills when one of my best friends, Umberto, decided to buy a guitar for himself and started to play too. We lived in the same building and I was basically his first guitar teacher. We started to play more and more together and in 1983 we enjoyed a wonderful trip together to Munich, Germany, where we basically paid most of our expenses by collecting tips when playing on Marienplatz. In the time frame of a few years, Umberto became a professional classical guitar master, while I dedicated my time to study for very demanding exams in college. So he became my teacher and I learned a lot from him.

 

My friend Umberto

 When I came to the United States, I left my guitar in Italy and, though I promised myself that one day I would play again, I never touched a string for two decades. So when my wife gave me an acoustic guitar as Christmas present last year, I thought it could well be a decorative object of the house, because it would take years for me to play a decent melody again.

I started to try a few simple tunes that I used to play in my 20’s, every day, every night. Amazingly enough, and against any expectation of mine, with a daily practice and some patience, after a few weeks and some sore fingers, I started to reproduce the same melodies I used to play over 20 years ago. After mastering the basic chords I had learned many years ago and working on proper positions, not only could I play the same music, but I could also play some music having more complicated tablatures, that I’d never tried in my life. I was amazed at what I could do and enjoyed my instrument more and more.

This proves that the brain is like a deep drawer where we store a lot of different things in our life, data that we are not even aware we possess anymore. The trick is to find the way to re-extract that knowledge and to keep it on the surface where you have easy access.

So, if practicing a language is like playing an instrument (or any other skill), I have to come to the following conclusions:

1. Learning a language when you are young is definitely an advantage because the brain memorizes the information and stores it in the long term memory. If you exercise on the instrument when you are a young adult, that knowledge will stick with you and you will play the same after many years when you use that same instrument.

2. If you learned the proper way, it is never too late to re-extract that data and use it right, even after two or three decades. It is there, even if you think it is gone. You just need to dig it out.

3. You must be patient when studying because at the beginning you are convinced that you will never be able to remember how to play that sequence of crazy positions on the fret board or how to properly use most of the 15 tenses to conjugate a regular verb.

4. You need to be consistent, because it takes time to reach a level where you don’t feel that people have to plug their ears when you play or speak.

5. Whatever level you are, you can get better. You can play a song better and better if you try each and every day, as you can pronounce and articulate a sentence better and faster if you use it consistently every day.

6. No matter how dedicated you are, there will always be a friend or neighbor who will play or speak better than you, because he or she has a better ear or because he or she has more time to study and practice. So don’t be frustrated, but listen to him or her and learn as much as you can, possibly playing or speaking with that person.

In conclusion, when students ask me what is the best way to learn Italian or to improve the knowledge of the language, I say: start studying now, be patient, be consistent, be confident, take your time, and don’t be disappointed if you don’t become fluent. It is important that even 20 years from now, you will be able to find your way again and to enjoy something you always liked.



First Words and Secret Codes

Genova, photo by Maryl Smith

My son was born in 1984 and the first word he learned from life in Cincinnati, Ohio was "owl."  Not the bird kind. The ATM.  In the mid-eighties, Central Trust (now PNC) created a marketing campaign to encourage customers to use a brand new technology with 24-hour access to their cash. They named their automatic teller machines the OWL and plastered locations all over town with their easily recognizable logo.  I didn't realize how often we were stopping by the money machine until one day my two year-old picked up on the obvious after I told him he couldn't have a toy truck in the window because we didn't have the money.  "OWL, Mommy, OWL," he said with a big smile, sure he'd solved all our problems.

Wow.  Usually parents are proud when kids learn something new all by themselves, but a quarter of a century after the fact, I'm still embarrassed about what came out of my babe's mouth and what it told me about who we were back then. 

I remember the first word I learned all by myself in Italian.

"Passione."

A few months after I started to date Michele, I enrolled at School Amici because his family didn't speak any English.  I was falling in love.  We talked about going home together.  Word got around quickly that I was the director's girlfriend and during the break other students would approach me about their "passione" for Italy.  "L'aria," they'd say with a dreamy look in their eyes .  "There's just something different about it."

I heard the word so often, "passione" naturally worked its way into homework assignments and dinner conversations, usually as a joke.  But I never interchanged the English word even if I was speaking English, because I could see in the speakers' eyes that the Italian version was a different beast, one that had nothing to do with sex and could not be directly translated no matter how much the two words sounded alike.

A couple years after we were married, I decided to spend two months in Siena working on my language skills at Dante Alighieri.  Different school.  Different country.  But there they were again, foreigners who looked a lot like me, usually middle-aged, almost always female, talking about their "passione."  Women from Germany.  Women from South Africa.  Women from Japan.  They'd flown half-way across the world to connect with a piece of their soul.

But my personal knowledge of the word remained purely intellectual. While I could use "passione" correctly in a sentence, it was something I'd never experienced about a place.  Italy was a pretty country, of course.  The food was tasty.  Lots of nice churches and old stuff.  "But I like lots of countries," I'd explain whenever this new group brought it up.  I was a cynic, secretly sure that these women were really just lonely and sad and depressed, desperately searching for a reason to feel.   "Passione must be the code word for a fling," is what I really thought, one last romance far from the tedious responsibilities of wherever they called home.

This year, ten years after I started to study the Italian language, I spent three weeks driving around the Riviera with my twenty-nine year-old daughter.  We had a blast.  One of the highlights happened on my last day when I overhead the desk clerk at the hotel explain to another member of the staff that the woman in Room 112 (me!) was American, but "lei parla italiano."

This time something had changed.  This time, I didn't want to get on the plane.  The morning after, when I put on a pot of coffee in my own kitchen, the same brand of coffee I always buy in Cincinnati, it tasted like sand.  I missed that faint, subtle scent in the early evening air that reminds you of nutmeg.   I went grocery shopping without make-up and when nobody sent the produce manager to the back in search of a more perfectly ripe melon, I was disappointed.  It was wrong, wrong, all wrong.

Three months later, it still is.  Italy apparently, with its great and infinite patience, has slowly whittled away at my defenses until I finally found my "passione."  It took me ten years, but I broke the code and now that's where I want to be, in a country where the first word you learn is about what you long for in your heart as opposed to efficient access to your cash..