News and Blog – Page 58 – DEV – The Umbra Institute – Study Abroad in Italy

After the first group of students arrived last Wednesday to direct enroll in the Italian university system, today’s the day the rest of Umbra students touch down on Italian soil. Arriving at Rome’s Fiumicino airport, they will be greeted by Umbra staff members, travel by private coach bus to Perugia, and check into a hotel where they will meet their future roommates. After having a chance to rest for a while, tonight the Umbra Fall Class of 2011 will enjoy a welcome dinner together with Umbra Institute student services and academic staff and faculty.

The next two days will be dedicated to Housing, Orientation and getting acquainted with Perugia.

It’s going to be a great semester! Benvenuti in Italia!!!

Clemson students visited the high end cashmere brand Brunello Cucinelli. B. Cucinelli factory is located in Solomeo, a 20 minutes from Perugia, a beautiful village surrounded by sunflower fields.

Over the past thirty years, as his company has grown from a one-man operation to a business employing five hundred people, with an annual turnover of more than two hundred million dollars, Cucinelli has been renovating Solomeo. It was really interesting visiting the backstage of such a company with an annual turnover of more than two hundred million dollars.

Read more from The New Yorker and visit the Cucinelli website — where you can find also an online store in which to spend all of your summer savings.

Perugia’s annual jazz festival, Umbria Jazz, begins in just two days! Harvard students, Intensive Italian students and USC/Clemson students will be here to enjoy the concerts and festivities. Perugia’s piazze are already lively as it is in the summer but Umbria Jazz turns the town into a live music festival, day and night! This year’s headliners include Sergio Mendez, Carlos Santana, Gilberto Gil, Liza Minelli, B.B. King and Prince.

Alessandra Pettinelli, Umbra Italian professor, publishes book on how to use Perugia as a “living language laboratory.”

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Umbra alumna Kylie Bearse, an International Journalism Festival intern while in Perugia, will be doing TV weather forecasting.

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Kylie Bearse, a Spring 2011 Umbra Institute Alumna, just began working for the Local News 8 team in Boulder, Colorado. During her time in Perugia, Kylie took advantage of Umbra’s internship program to work closely with the International Journalism Festival, which invites world-renowned journalists to come to the Umbrian city to give talks and workshop and is regularly attended by such names as Al Gore, Julian Assange, and Walter Vetroni (Italian politician and ex-mayor of Rome).

Kylie said that “a love and passion for traveling and experiencing other cultures propelled her to spend her last semester abroad in Perugia, Italy studying Italian, the Italian Media system and eating as much delicious Italian food as possible.” We knew she was destined for big things and couldn’t be happier — best of luck, Kylie!

You can also read the original Local News 8 team article!

It’s hard to say what the best part of the art show was: the freshly-painted frescos; the pastel exposition; the photo gallery; or the dance movie, put together by Springfield College’s Cynthia Nazzaro and her Renaissance Dance class. The culmination of the art students’ work was put on display on Monday at the Umbra Institute’s Via dei Priori building, with the frescos painted by the students nicely matching the ones that still adorn some walls there.

Although Umbra puts on an art show to showcase the courses’ accomplishments at the end of each semester, this was certainly one of the most successful and abundant in terms of work displayed, particularly considering the Renaissance Dance movie that was shot, edited, and presented.

Complimenti a tutti!

In the 1300s an association of doctors set up a dorm in Perugia for orphans. 700 years later the dorm is still there, and the residents decided they wanted a rematch. Two months ago an Umbra Institute soccer team defeated the dorm’s team in soccer, the Italian national sport. Last week it was basketball.

Unfortunately, Umbra’s dream team was unable to bring home the gold. In a cross-over game organized by Umbra Director for Community Affairs Francesco Gardenghi, the Italians beat their American guests 47-43. Everyone noted with irony the reversal of games, and a good time was had by all.

It was finally time for Professor Zach Nowak’s now-legendary pizza workshop. He accompanied students to Pizza e musica, where he gave them a quick history of pizza in Italy, beginning with Queen Margherita. Felice, a true neopolitan pizzaiolo, then showed them the basics of pizza making and even had them try their own hand at it. Who knew that once a pizza is in the wood oven – which, by the way, takes hours to get up to temperature – that it has to be quickly rotated in order to cook it evenly? How do these master pizzaioli manage to put five pizzas in at different times and still manage to have them all come out together, cooked perfectly? The answer: practice.

Of course, at the end of the demonstration and workshop, all the students were treated to their own fresh, wood oven-cooked pizza. Tasty!

What do the ancient Egyptians, eighteenth-century Italians, and students at the Umbra Institute have in common? They all think that “Appetite comes while eating” (L’appetito viene mangiando). Yesterday Umbra food history professor Zachary Nowak took a group of students to a local café, where he explained the age-old social outing that the Italians call aperitivo. One goes to a café at 7 or 8 in the evening, orders a small drink, and gets a buffet included in the price. Nowak explained both the typical drinks (the Spritz, made with prosecco and neon-red Aperol Bitter, as well as the Campari Orange) as well as the social geography of the aperitivo. Italians tend to use it as a way to go out with friends without having to make dinner or be out late, and students take advantage of being able to pay for a drink but eat as well. The next Umbra Food Workshop is next Monday: Pizza-Making!