February 2023

On Halloween 2018, Italian Program faculty and students, led by Prof. Beth Coggeshall, staged a marathon reading of Dante’s Inferno on Landis Green.

We officially closed our celebration of Italian-American Heritage Month with a grand Serata italiana at the Urban Market, organized and hosted by our outstanding MA students!

Three undergraduate students working with Professor Beth Coggeshall presented their research and creative projects inspired by Dante’s Commedia. UROP researchers Alexa Kellenberger and Aki Jones, who worked with Prof. Coggeshall throughout the 2018-19 academic year on the website Dante Today, presented posters related to their UROP research.

With the generous sponsorship of the newly endowed Azzurra B. Givens fund for Excellence in Italian studies, FSU’s Italian Program hosted a two-day symposium on environmental humanities called “The Matter of the World: Reflections on the Environment.”

On October 30, 2019, the students of the Gamma Kappa Alpha National Italian Honor Society at FSU sponsored the second annual Marathon Reading of Dante’s Inferno. Faculty, students, and community members participated in the reading, which ran from 3pm to 8:45pm on Landis Green in front of Strozier Library.

In April 2020 the Program invited students to join Italian faculty to celebrate a virtual Honors Night via Zoom. We announced awards for our outstanding graduate and undergraduate students and for exceptional program service, and we inducted 18 of our students to Gamma Kappa Alpha, the National Italian Honor Society.

Popular Italian language instructor and vlogger Lucrezia (from "Learn Italian with Lucrezia") interviews fourth-year Italian and Music student Adam Lacy about how he studies.

On October 29, 2021, the students of the Italian Club and Società italiana at FSU sponsored the fourth annual Marathon Reading of Dante’s Inferno. Faculty and students returned to Landis Green to read the entire poem (an event that lasts about six hours), after hosting a shortened virtual reading event on Zoom last spring. The Marathon Reading was the last event in our series of activities celebrating Italian American Heritage Month in October.

As a way to boost spirits while students headed into the final stretch of the fall semester, Italian professor Irene Zanini Cordi and the students of the Società italiana hosted a virtual cooking class. The event, which was attended by over 75 Zoom participants, taught students how to make the classic coffee-based dessert tiramisu, which means “pick-me-up” in Italian.