Pitt in Florence - Semester

This is a part-time internship (20 hours per week). In addition, you will attend weekly discussion-led sessions that include educational support and mentoring in a classroom environment, develop personal and professional skills, and learn to contextualize your internship experience socially and culturally. You will receive 3 credits for this course.
Please note internships are available for students who have successfully completed three semesters of coursework at Pitt or a transfer university as a degree-seeking student. 

This course is a creative writing workshop designed to explore the experience of traveling and living abroad in Florence in both verse and prose. Along with the workshop we will also read and discuss texts that focus on Italy in general and Florence specifically from both the native and foreign perspectives, noting particularly the literary techniques and strategies that various writers have used to verbally map out the territory of the city and to express their own place and experiences within its walls. The texts will provide us with a forum for discussing each author’s relationship to and the literary expression of place. The texts will also provide us with models for weekly writing exercises.  I believe that we can use our unique position as sojourners abroad to begin to chart our own internal and imaginative landscapes. Our ultimate goal will be to produce a finalized, substantial text—or series of short texts—suitable for performance and/or publication in the literary world beyond this class.

This course introduces students to painting, sculpture, and architecture in Florence in the Renaissance. Beginning with the great projects of the Middle Ages that defined the religious and political centers of the city, attention focuses on major monuments of the Renaissance. Discussion will center on how works of art were made, their style, and how they communicate intellectual meaning. Sub-themes that intersect with the most recent research in the field of art history are interwoven into each class period. Topics for discussion include the cross-cultural fertilization of artistic ideas, how women, the poor, and children were depicted in Renaissance art, conflicting ideas regarding patronage, and how works of art construct religious, political, gender, and class identities. This course analyzes the interrelationship between people's creative achievements and their society. In other words, students must understand a work of art in the social, artistic, and historical context of medieval and renaissance Florence.

This course is designed to teach you the basic vocabulary and grammar you need to navigate Italian culture, history, and society. This innovative class consists of face-to-face class meetings in which students practice their Italian in communicative activities.  In addition, students will watch/listen/read lectures, complete exercises to hone their Italian linguistic skills. Students will also  learn about Italian culture, including Italian fashion and design, travel destinations, popular culture, and contemporary literature.  Primary goal is to achieve competence in the spoken language, along with basic skills in reading and writing.

Learn Italian in a comfortable and interactive classroom environment! This course is designed to teach you the vocabulary and grammar you need to navigate Italian culture, history, and society. This course consists of face-to-face class meetings in which students practice their Italian in communicative activities. Students will also watch/listen/read lectures, complete exercises to hone their linguistic skills to better their Italian. In addition, students will learn about Italian culture, including current events, Italian politics, and contemporary literature and cinema. Emphasis continues to be placed on the oral-aural skills, but the reading and writing skills become increasingly stressed.

An introduction to the Italian language, including basic grammar, vocabulary and speech patterns. Primary goal is to achieve competence in the spoken language, along with basic skills in reading and writing. Face-to-face lesson meetings consist of communicative activities in which students practiced learned structures and vocabulary.  Students will watch/listen/read lectures, complete exercises related to grammar and vocabulary. This instructional approach is designed to allow for maximum interaction in the classroom environment, so that students can receive extensive feedback on their progress. 

This is an advanced-intermediate level course, taught in Italian, designed for students who have already taken Italian language for three semesters. Students will expand their existing vocabulary and continue to develop their linguistic competencies by engaging in the reading, viewing, analysis of authentic materials, such as ads, brochures, videos, songs, magazine articles, films and short literary texts selected to expose students to modern Italy and its cultural, political, socio-economic history.

The course will introduce students to the history of Italian Literature, focusing on great masterpieces (in English translation) from the 14th to the 16th century. A multidisciplinary approach, dealing with social, political, historical and philosophical implications will provide further understanding by placing literary works in a comprehensive cultural context. Special emphasis will be placed on the impact of Italian literature in European culture in pre-modern age, stressing the broad influence of Dante's Comedy, Boccaccio's Decameron and Ariosto's Orlando Enraged. Students will be provided with the basic operational tools to help them recognize different literary genres and understand why certain forms of artistic expression are peculiar to certain ages, at times to the exclusion of others. Literary issues such as the great divide between high and low literature, the question of language, the relation between classical, Christian and chivalric epics, the concept of originality in the Middle Ages, the circulation of books and the development of a reading public will be thoroughly investigated. Students will be able to follow the formation and the evolution of the mainstream literary tradition, and appreciate the innovative charge, both in form and content, of the works selected. They will also learn to practice a close reading of the texts, and will be encouraged to form their own critical opinion on the writings analyzed for their oral presentations. The first lessons will be devoted to a general overview of the 13th and the 14th centuries both from a historical and a more specifically literary perspective. Then the focus will shift onto the role of Dante in shaping the vernacular literature as a means to bridge the gap between academic and popular culture, to Boccaccio's ground-breaking work in restyling storytelling into an art of conversation and therefore a collective enterprise, and finally to Ariostol's humorous contemplation of human vanity and foolishness. Each lecture introducing a new author will be preceded by a brief outline of his life and literary output, and will then proceed with the description and analysis of his major work.

This course will explore the field of cross-cultural psychology through a focus on a specific country and its inhabitants: Italy. Aspects of cross-cultural analysis from the field of cross-cultural psychology (as well as interdisciplinary elements from sociology, anthropology, biology and ecology) will be discussed, including: cultural influence on human behavior, attitudes, values, communication and societal organization. Special topics of ethnocentrism, individual vs. collective societies, plural societies, cultural views on mental health, and intercultural communication are highlighted. Methodological issues of cross-cultural research will be reviewed, and students will have the opportunity to conduct a cross-cultural interview and be participant-observers of their own experience here in Italy. The city of Florence and its inhabitants become the classroom through various excursions and field work. Participants are encouraged to reflect on their own cultural origins in regards to behaviors, communication, attitudes and values, as well as their acculturation experiences while studying in Italy.

Florence is a global heritage city: millions of people every day crowd into its small streets admiring the ancient buildings and its artistic heritage, which creates revenue as well as issues. For this reason, contemporary Florence and its inhabitants are less well-known by visitors. Florence today has an ethnically diverse population with complex socio-cultural dynamics that shape the identity of this fascinating city. Although migration to the city has intensified over the last few decades, ‘multiculturalism’ is not a recent phenomenon: over the centuries the city has celebrated diversity, with different ethnic groups, different nationalities and various religious groups who have contributed to Florence’s social and cultural wealth. Even the briefest of walks can unveil this wealth to the eyes of the attentive observer – and it is precisely this ‘below the surface’ understanding that this course provides. Florence is, and always has been, a ‘global’ city. We will analyze the complex dynamics that shape the identity of Florence by applying a critical perspective to the notion of globalization and by analyzing the socio-cultural forces at play both historically and presently. Students will learn to analyze the cultural variety present in the city, examining which ethnic communities live in Florence today, and gaining insight into their lives through scholarly sources and direct observation. Throughout the course we will discuss the relativity of cultural values; we will analyze how multicultural aspects of Florence’s identity have been discursively constructed and by which social actors; we will review which policies the local and national administration have put into effect to deal with these issues.