This blog documents the experiences of students currently studying at the Umbra Institute in Perugia, Italy, offering an account of their day-to-day experiences, extra- and co-curricular activities, and special events. We hope you gain some insight into what adventures Umbra students find outside the classroom during their semester in Perugia, a medieval town in the mountains of Umbria. Cheers!
Thursday evening, Umbra and local Italian students convened at the Onaosi campus to play a Valentine’s Day basketball game. The first of several of the semester, the games offer students the opportunity to share language and culture in an informal setting.
Although basketball was born in America, the Italian team took the game.
“We’ll get them next time,” a student was overheard saying as he walked off the court.
Almost 100 costumed Umbra students, staff, and faculty packed La Botte Tuesday night for Umbra Pizza Night: Carnevale Edition.
Celebrating Martedi Grasso (Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, etc.: the traditionally “sin-filled” day before today’s start of Lent) and enjoying another Pizza Night in one fell swoop, the event was a success. Approximately one third of students arrived in costume; 100 percent of the attending staff and faculty were transformed. The pizzeria staff served Phantoms of the Opera, 1940s pin-up girls, and clowns without the blink of an eye (well, there were maybe a few raised eyebrows).
After the last slice of pizza disappeared, Umbra voted on the best student and staff/faculty costumes.
Unrecognizable (from the neck up), Umbra student Camilo Lopez won a pizza from Mediterranea for his rendition of a unicorn.
His bow and arrows a plastic threat to all, Umbra staff member Marco Bagli claimed the honor of best staff/faculty costume as Robin Hood.
Mark your calendar for the next and final Umbra Pizza Night at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 19, at La Botte!
Two Umbra Institute professors took their lesson on the road this weekend.
On Friday, Giordana Pulcini’s Politics and Economics of the European Union students traveled to Rome to visit the in-depth Italian history museum.
Antonella Valorosa’s Contemporary Italy students visited Siena Saturday to learn about the still-active contrade (neighborhoods with strict borders and stricter cultural traditions) that participate in the annual Palio (horse race: see image) in the Campo.
Pulcini and Valorosa said the invaluable field trips allow students to see and experience the facts and ideas they learn in the classroom.
Andy Steves, son of well-known travel writer Rick Steves, gave a travel workshop at the Umbra Institute Thursday evening. Drawing on his lifetime of travel experience, Steves provided students with tips on how to travel around Italy and the rest of Europe on a student budget. Along with logistical suggestions about budget airlines and inexpensive lodging, he emphasized the importance of traveling with cultural awareness, interacting with locals, and planning a balanced itinerary that leaves room for spontaneity.
Steves developed the workshop after studying abroad in Rome in 2008.
“By the time I was 20, I’d been to Europe 21 times,” Steves admitted. “But when I studied abroad, it was a different experience entirely. My dad writes a great travel book, but when you’re only spending two-to-three days in Paris, 600 pages of suggestions won’t do you much good. There was a lack of information geared towards the student abroad.”
After graduating from Notre Dame in 2010, Steves created Weekend Student Adventures, a travel organization that, as the name suggests, offers weekend-long trips to well-known European cities. The packages balance sight-seeing, interactions with locals, and free time for independent exploration.
At the conclusion of the workshop, Umbra students crowded around Steves, sharing Ryanair travel woes and asking about everything from Parisian bike tours to spelunking in Budapest.
If you missed the workshop, stop by Marco and Addy’s office to pick up a WSA Almost All You Need To Know While Abroad Pocketbook.
“There’s an old peasant proverb: ‘Leave the land a little better than you found it,’” said Stefano Cantelmo, head engineer for Castello Montevibiano Vecchio Winery in Italy.
Standing 20 feet below ground level, Umbra Institute students listened carefully as Cantelmo leaned on one of the 200 oak barrels full of new wine on Friday. Two Umbra classes visited the winery in the hills above the Tiber Valley on Jan. 25 and Feb. 1 for Business of Food in Italy and International Marketing, respectively.
After showing the classes the barrels in the winery’s cantina, Cantelmo described his work.
“I designed the sustainability project for the winery,” he explained. “We use both high-tech [solar cells, biodiesel] and low-tech [passive cooling, roofs painted white] to reduce our carbon footprint. And in 2010 we were certified zero emissions.”
Montevibiano has since won a Slow Food award for sustainable winemaking and an award for wine quality – a great combination for the winery, according to CEO Lorenzo Fasola Bologna.
“We started the project because zero emissions was the right thing to do for the environment, and it was the right thing for the winery in terms of visibility,” he explained.
Bologna and Cantelmo are interested in the possibility of selling the eco-wine in the U.S. market.
After the past two Fridays’ field trips, the Umbra students will build on service learning projects for each course. The project was started by Food Studies Program Coordinator and Professor Zach Nowak during the spring 2012 semester. This year, Nowak’s Business of Food class will be focus on helping Montevibiano Winery write a pitch for an American wine importer, including how to market the “green” wine in the U.S.
“‘Green’ isn’t the typical color you think of when you think wine, but we think it’s an even more important color than red or white, in the long run,” Nowak joked. “Montevibiano’s wine is the perfect marriage of tradition — their castle is over 1000 years old — and innovation. The students’ proposals will be focused on how to make eco-wine popular in the U.S., to promote responsible consumption that helps the earth.
The International Marketing students’ projects will focus on how to improve the marketing strategies already in place.
“I decided to enroll in International Marketing to broaden my view on how business works around the world and to help understand how to market products to other areas of the world outside of the U.S., specifically in Italy,” said Umbra student Michael Durfee. “This field trip helped get a true international perspective on marketing; speaking to the head of marketing at Montevibiano gave me a new insight on how the European market works.”
“Today felt like a true Italian experience,” Durfee concluded.
From the subtleties of how to enjoy a free pizza to the intricacy of wine tasting, Umbra students enjoyed a culturally busy week.
Tuesday night, staff and students gathered at la Botte, a pizzeria with exposed brick walls and a traditional wood-firedoven, for the first of several Umbra Pizza Nights. The event gives students and staff the opportunity to mingle over free pizza in an informal setting, explained Student Services Assistant Marco Bagli. Almost all the students attended, Bagli said.
On Thursday, two dozen students went to the local enoteca Énonè for a wine tasting led by Silvia Bartolini, a professional sommelier. Bartolini taught the group how to pair wine with foods and how to analyze wine based on visual, olfactory, and taste cues.
“It helps students delve into the Italian lifestyle,” Bagli noted.
“It was very educational,” agreed student John Mackessey. “It gave me a better understanding of how wine was actually produced.”
Note: The next Pizza Night, Feb. 12, coincides with Martedi Grasso (Mardi Gras), or Carnevale. To celebrate, Umbra students, staff, and faculty will come to the Pizza Night in costume. Mark your calendar!
Umbra alumni can now join our group on LinkedIn! By joining this group, former students will have access to discussion forums, connections to past alumni, and any jobs posted by Umbra alumni. It’s a great way to make professional connections and find support in job searches. The group can be found by searching for “Umbra Institute Alumni” on LinkedIn or following this link.
For alumni who join our group, there is space to insert their experience abroad in the Education section which can attract future employers! Students can simply write “The Umbra Institute” for the school name.
Interested? We’ve even provided a sample description students can write for the Umbra Institute to attract employers (changed based on personal experience): “I studied in the General Studies Program at the Umbra Institute with a focus in Art History. During my semester abroad, I reached a conversational level in Italian, participated in a service learning project in the Perugia, Italy community, and practiced skills in cross-cultural communication.”
Don’t forget to describe your activities at the Umbra Institute in your resume, too!
If you go into an Italian café and ask for a “mocha,” you’ll get a perplexed stare. The same will happen if you request a
cappuccino after 11am. And what about the difference between an espresso in the ceramic cup, and a little glass one.* These and other topics were covered last night in the Coffee Workshop, one of a series of five food-related workshops that are part of The History and Culture of Food in Italy, the core course of the Umbra Institute’s Food Studies Program.
Professor Zachary Nowak led the workshop, first talking about coffee’s domestication in Ethiopia and export from the Yemeni port of Mokka, then moving on to a word about processing and how making coffee is different in Italy. The workshop closed with a demonstration by Umbra staff member Mauro Renna on how to use the Italian moka coffeemaker, as well as tasting various kinds of Italian coffees. The next workshop will be next week, on the Italian pastime of the aperitivo.
*”Moka” refers to the little hexagonal Italian home coffee maker, not a coffee with chocolate. Cappuccino is only for breakfast in Italy. The glass cup is considered more elegant.
On Thursday and Friday of last week, the students in the INIT 350: Academic Internship and Seminar- Education course visited the two high schools where their internship will take place. They first met with teachers at the Montessori high school in Perugia to learn about the school’s teaching methods and what their role would be in the classroom. Students who choose this internship track will independently develop their own lesson plans and interactive workshops centered around Italian and American music, travel, and culture.
The next day, Friday, January 18th, students walked down to the Alessi Scientific High School to meet with Lucia Amico, the teacher responsible for coordinating the intern program at their school. After explaining how students would assist the English teachers in speaking and listening exercises, Lucia gave the students a tour of the school. Students in this internship placement will collaborate closely with two different teachers, offering them insight into different teaching techniques and engaging them with a wider student audience.
These school visits allowed Umbra students in the Education Internship first-hand understanding of their prospective internship placements. Based on the two visits, students chose which school’s pedagogy and internship requirements interested them most, and placements will be made shortly!
Umbra’s largest classroom overflowed with students eager to attend the Travel Workshop on Monday evening. Led by Umbra SIT intern Julia Bourque and staff members Marco Bagli and Caitlin Addlesperger, the workshop offered tips and tricks for traveling independently around Italy and internationally on a student budget.
After advice ranging from what to do if your passport is lost or stolen to how to avoid Ryanair’s infamous hidden fees to Couchsurfing anecdotes, students left the workshop well-versed on what to pack (or not), modes of transportation (check out this in-depth site about trains!), and inexpensive lodging options.
If you missed the Travel Workshop, stop by the front desk and pick up an Umbra packet of useful travel information and the “Almost All You Need To Know While Abroad Pocketbook,” a handy pocket-sized guide to student travel from Weekend Student Adventures, the company of travel writer Rick Steves’ son, Andy Steves.
Buon viaggio!
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