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

Alone, But Not Lonely

by Karkie Tackett (Advanced Student at School Amici)

Karkie's place in Siena

I went to Italy alone because, in the words of Henry David Thoreau, “I wanted to live deliberately.”  I wanted to find my own way, and I wanted to speak and hear the language that I remember from so long ago.  The sound of that language (Italian) brings many memories of courtesy, history, happiness and tradition.  In this frightening world, I wanted to be reminded that in Italy, life is beautiful, slow, and celebrated.  I hoped that I could bring a little of that happiness home with me.

In Italy, I wanted to stay long enough in one place to learn the names of people in a nearby bar or shop.  I wanted to learn the streets, take long walks, see ancient art and architecture, meet new friends and try new types of food.  I didn’t know which town would be the best, but a friend in Rome told me that his first choice would always be Siena.

When Michele Alonzo, Director of School Amici, heard that I was thinking of Siena, he suggested that I should contact the school Saena Iulia.  I looked online, wrote a brief e-mail, and quickly received the first of many kind and generous messages from that school.  Siena, and Saena Iulia, would be mine!

The school is located in an ancient palace directly behind the Duomo.  It’s in the center of Siena and enjoys an easy rapport with stores and bars all around.  From the open windows of the school, you can hear singing, shouting and laughing…all very joyous and all very Italian.

Every day at school, we had conversation in the morning, we enjoyed a coffee during the break, and we finished class in time for a lunch with the other students.  No one wanted to speak English, and so we continued to practice our Italian during meals, over the afternoon and during our walks.

Coffee break with students

The school offers excursions and helps with arrangements such as lodging but it is not a tourist agency.  It is a serious school with expert, well-educated instructors who are native speakers of Italian.  It has a rigorous curriculum and the lessons are stimulating.  I have always been discouraged by the conjunctive tense…but my teacher, Signorina Sabrina, taught it well and I think that (penso che) in the future, it will be (sia) easier for me.

Ricciarelli

After the lessons, we went together to explore Siena and to eat very, very well.  We discovered museums, churches, parks and we also discovered a typical soup called ribollita, sformato di formaggio (kind of baked cheese), whole roasted onions, and the delicate pastry called ricciarelli.   During a visit to Assisi, our director, Mauro Faleri, took us on a marvelous tour of the works of art in the church of St. Frances.  We explored the town of Assisi and found a salumeria (deli) where all the sausages and hams were of boar.

My memories of Siena are made up of many small pieces.  I want to list some of them: when you understand Italian but you remain silent, you sometimes overhear other conversations.  I was surprised to hear two bus drivers speaking rapidly about a woman.  I heard one man saying “….but she’s from Naples; and that is a big problem.”  (Unfortunately, I couldn’t ask what the problem is with Neapolitan women). I got the giggles with an Italian lady while we were waiting at a bus stop.  We both hoped that when the bus came, our driver would be that stupendously handsome one I had seen the day before. 
By mistake, I think I insulted a woman in a grocery store when I asked for dadi di porcini (mushroom stock cube)  “We don’t have any dadi here, signora!” she said, with a little edge to her voice.   She did, of course, have real porcini for sale. One waiter told me he is a student of film, and I looked like a famous American actress, but he couldn’t remember who.  This got my attention!  I insisted that he tried to remember.  Finally, he said it was Gena Rowlands.   I resemble Gena Rowlands to him.  I’ll take that!   He was a fine boy in a great trattoria.  I returned to eat there two more times (Us American actresses are very loyal!). 
I learned a very useful word: scorciatoia (shortcut). A fine word. In Siena, the shortcuts are varied and glorious.

Liz, Mauro, Carol and Karkie

I travelled in Italy by myself but in Italy, you are never alone. The Sienese, like most Italians, are a little formal (we must always greet each other with buongiorno ….always), but warm, and welcoming.  They want to help visitors and they love to chat.  My classmates at Saena Iulia (Juliet, Carol and Liz….God bless you all) were marvelous and I hope to see them again and again. My favorite thing to hear was "But madam, you speak Italian". Thanks to my teachers Michele, Mariateresa, Mauro and Sabrina, it is almost true! I said to one man that my Italian is a little rusty. He laughed and said: "Then you must come back to remove the rust". I think that he is right.