Umbra Blog – Page 52 – DEV – The Umbra Institute – Study Abroad in Italy

It’s incredible! It’s the first semester that we have done karaoke during Tandem. If you’re studying abroad and you want to integrate and learn the language, you need practice. So what a better solution then to do karaoke in Italy!

We had five teams last night singing only Italian songs. Well, one group paid off the dj and sang in English and, while they were entertaining, they didn’t get any credit.

So here are the winners:

WINNERS: singing “Meraviglioso”by Negroamaro

2nd Place: singing “Bomba”

3rd place: singing “Ombellico del mondo” by Jovanotti

This past weekend, twenty Umbra students and one of their Italian classmates took a whirlwind tour of Florence and Milan with Professor Adrian Hoch’s Leonardo da Vinci course. The first stop in Florence was, fittingly, the historical Bar San Firenze café, where a young Masaccio once had his workshop. Fortified with coffee, everyone was toured open-mouthed through the famous Uffizi and then the Palazzo Vecchio. By late afternoon, everyone got onto the bus next to the Arno and was sped up to the hotel in Milan.

The day begin with a blue-skied stop at the Castello Sforzesco, known as much for its Michelangelo sculpture as for the enormous, complex Da Vinci frescos that can be found on the ceilings of the castle’s many rooms. A jump across the city brought them first to Santa Maria della Grazia before the main event: Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” which is held in a humidity-controlled room and for which reservations must be made as many as five months in advance.

After a break for lunch, students strolled through the stunning duomo of Milan and then into a Da Vinci exhibit at a local museum at which they saw an enormous, full-sized “cartoon” (sketch) of Raphael’s of a fresco that can be found in the Sistine Chapel. After attempting to read Da Vinci’s backwards handwriting in his Atlantic Code, they all walked out into the crisp Milanese day and off to the waiting bus.

A long weekend, but well worth it.

After three months away from the Stars & Stripes, Umbra Institute students who study abroad in Italy are ready for a change away from pizza, pasta, and canoli. Which is why the “Trattoria Americana” tickets have been an easy sell. A part of the community engagement part of the the “Business of Food: Italy and Beyond” course (one of the three Food Studies Program courses), students have to decide on a concept for a restaurant, come up with a marketing plan after pricing the dishes, and then actually run the restaurant for an evening.

This semester’s students decided that by offering American fare, they could attract not only food-sick (as opposed to home-sick) Americans but also curious Italians. Despite their opinion about their own food’s culinary superiority, Italians are often eager to sample American food. This has proved to be a winning marketing strategy, judging by the response so far. The dinner, which will be November 29th, will be Caesar salad, mac&cheese, a hamburger, onion rings, and brownies. Tickets are €12, €11 each for an eight-person table.

This Sunday was as unseasonably warm day for November in Umbria, a day with not a cloud in the sky and perfect sun. The twenty students participating in the Food Studies Program, as well as a contingent from Connecticut College, met up in front of the fifteenth-century palace that is one of the Umbra Institute’s two buildings. A short bus ride later they were climbing up the steep hills of the village of Celle, near the border of Umbria and Tuscany. This part of the Apennines is renowned for its production of truffles, and students were able to have a short demonstration from Giuseppe, a master tartufaio (truffle hunter) and his somewhat skittish truffle dog-in-training, Lola. Despite Lola’s reluctance to perform in front of a large group, the pair found three small black truffles, enough to use as a garnish for lunch.

Lunch was a feast…but first, the students had to earn their keep. Guided by their host, Aldo, whose family has for over a hundred and twenty years harvested the olive trees the students surrounded, the Umbra students set up the nets around the trees and picked. The result wasn’t overwhelming–Aldo said that if they were sharecroppers, they’d have a hard time–but enough to move to the next round, lunch. Aldo’s sister Patrizia had made a variety of classic dishes, including bruschette with freshly-pressed olive oil, grilled onions and bell peppers, and meat cooked on the grill outside. After a dessert treat (made with chestnut flower) and caffè, everyone piled on the bus and headed down to a nearby olive mill, where the owner showed the students the machines that wash and crush the olives of local farmers, then separate the oil from the pulp. Happy and with full bellies, students got on the bus and headed back to Perugia.

Belonging to a choir composed of people from all over the world is a unique opportunity to take advantage of while in Perugia during your semester of study abroad. Italy is famous for operas and if you are interested in singing or playing an instrument while in Perugia, Umbra has a partnership with the University for Foreigners which offers free weekly encounters where international students gather to practice and then perform free concerts every Tuesday. Concerts are open to the general public, all are welcome!

Umbra also has a partnership with University for Foreigners: you can go through Umbra to take intensive Italian in Italy and get credit for your university.

umbra institute student after concert — Umbra student Ryan Foley with Professor Ragni.

Umbra students took on the Onaosi Male Institute team for a game of basketball. Students dribbled, ran, and shot baskets up and down the indoor basketball court wearing green jerseys and fierce faces. Umbra’s team had an honorary Italian player who helped them come to a near victory. Fans cheered on both teams from the stands, spelling out ‘UMBRA’ for everyone to see. The game came to a climactic end when an Italian student made a successful three-point shot just as the final buzzer went off. A big thanks to the Onaosi Male Institute for hosting the game.

Prof. John L. Dennis, along with several students of the INIT 350 Academic Internship & Seminar, Psychology, submitted an invited conference submission for a symposium “Inside the Creative Mind” organized by Prof. Alessandro Antonietti (Università del Sacro Cuore Milano) at the annual meeting for the Italian Association for Cognitive Science held at The University of Milan, December 1-2. The submission was on on how Genetic Algorithms can be useful for modeling human creativity. The symposium will include presentations by Mathematicians, Philosophers, and Linguists as well as Psychologists.

Students (using Google Documents) collaborated simultaneously on the article submission, which discusses how Genetic Algorithms, despite following procedures that are not “intelligent,” are able to find solutions that can be recognized as intelligent. The article argues that several principles of Genetic Algorithms – for example, the memorization, storage and retrieval of information as well as the combination and recombination of simple elements within a mechanical procedure of trial and error – can be used to formulate the foundation of a cumulative creative process.

san-martino-in-perugia — Roasted chestnuts are a new experience for most students who study abroad in Italy.

A typical end of summer event in small towns all over Italy is the “sagra,” or town fair. Each sagra is dedicated to one food or another–examples include the “Sagra of the Onion” in nearby Canarra or the “Sagra of Prosciutto”–though oftentimes these sagre are a modern-day invention, more for fun for locals and to draw some tourists than a continuation of an ages-old tradition.

San Martino (Saint Martin’s Day) is different. Rural Italians’ agricultural rhythms were closely tied to a calendar with many days upon which you had to do one thing or another. San Giovanni (Saint John’s Day, June 24th) is the when you have to pick unripe walnuts and make nocino, a walnut liquer. Saint Martin’s Day was when, on the other hand, it was time to decant the mostly-fermented new wine from one cask to another. Italians celebrated by drinking a bit of the new wine (vino novello) and eating roasted chestnuts. This festival falls on November 11th but is celebrated for a whole week in the town named after Saint Martin, San Martino in Colle.

Umbra Institute students participating in the Food Studies Program had the opportunity to visit the sagra held in San Martino this past week. After taking a bus fifteen minutes outside of town, they were met by local resident and chef Michele Brustenghi, who had invited the students to dinner with him, his wife, his daughter and his brother. Students ate a variety of local dishes, including polenta with sausage, pasta with a wild boar sauce, and grilled veggies. After dinner students walked up into the medieval core of the small town and enjoyed jazz music and chestnuts with the locals on the main piazza.

Last week, the Business in Europe and International Marketing students ventured to Gualdo Tadino and Città di Castello. These two charming Umbrian towns are known for their artisan products including traditionally-made ceramics and furniture. Students interviewed the artisans in their workshops and learned everything from how paints are mixed as they were in the 1500’s, to how kiln firing secrets are passed down from generation to generation and sustainability efforts being made to preserve the wood supply in Italy.

Several workshops and a furniture exposition later, students now have the task of assisting the regional Umbrian government in uniting Umbrian artisans under a brand called ‘Umbria Artigianato’. With this brand, the local government hopes to strengthen and promote the local artisan industries both in Italy and abroad. This collaboration brings to life a real case study- helping preserve Umbrian artisan industries by ensuring their growth and success locally and internationally. This service learning project, which combines community work with classroom theory, will continue in the coming semesters at Umbra. Stay tuned!

Umbra Professor and Food Program director Zachary Nowak spoke on October 27th at Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut. The lecture, titled “The Myth of ‘Eat Local’: The Case of Tuscan Butcher Dario Cecchini,” covers the basic misunderstandings behind the “Eat Local” movement, as explained through the framework of famed butcher (and Food Studies Program field trip host) Dario Cecchini.

Nowak focused on Cecchini’s much-criticized choice to import his meat from Spain. This is seemingly unsustainable, given the energy transportation “costs,” but Nowak pointed out that of a food’s embodied energy, transportation is a small (though still significant, at about 10-12%) part. Indeed, it is the food’s primary production and its cooking that are the energy sinks. Cecchini’s animals in Spain are grass-fed, not needing the ten months of barley and oats (and corn) that local Chianti cows need. Because grain production is so intensive, and because grain in Italy is often imported from Canada and Argentina, it actually saves energy to grass-feed far away and then bring the meat to Cecchini’s restaurants.

Read the full article on the website for The College Voice, Connecticut College’s student newspaper.