Weaving a 'beautiful tapestry of Italian experience'

New York City restaurateur Danny Meyer ’80 gave a campus lecture a couple of years ago about food and hospitality. Owner of the popular and critically acclaimed Union Square Café, Gramercy Tavern, Eleven Madison Park, and Tabla restaurants, Meyer attributes his career choice to the life-changing semester he spent at Trinity’s Rome campus. His lecture was sponsored by Trinity’s Cesare Barbieri Endowment for Italian Culture, and it neatly dovetailed with a course that Associate Professor of Modern Languages Dario Del Puppo was teaching called “Food in Italian History, Society, and Art.” The lecture attracted not only Trinity students, but also members of the Hartford community, including the city’s active Italian-American community.

The event reflected the synergy that characterizes Trinity’s approach to Italian studies. Academic study, complementary extracurricular events, study abroad, and interaction with real-world cultural experts all are contributing elements. “Students have a range of opportunities that fit together,” notes John Alcorn, associate director of Italian programs. “It’s really a beautiful tapestry of Italian experience.”

The beginning
The story of Italian programs at Trinity begins with Professor Emeritus Michael Campo, who in the 1950s believed that Italian was, in terms of course enrollment, “the Cinderella of the modern languages department.” His recruitment of students brought about a mini-renaissance of Italian culture and history at Trinity. Today, Trinity offers the kind of curricular depth and range in Italian studies that one would expect to find only at a big university, says Director of Italian Programs Borden W. Painter, Jr., who took over the reins of the programs when Campo retired. “There’s a richness here that’s unusual in a small college,” Painter says.

Trinity students can choose from an array of courses in a variety of disciplines that give breadth and texture to the study of Italy. The department of modern languages is, of course, the locus of instruction in speaking, reading, and writing Italian.  Students in Alcorn's course on "Mafia and history in social sciences perspectives" (in photo on right) explored such lively debate topics as "Is it rational to join the mafia in Sicily?"  The art history curriculum provides a rich exploration of Italian art and artists in such courses as  “High Renaissance Art in Italy,” taught by Assistant Professor of Fine Arts Jean Cadogan. The classics department offers important perspectives through courses on the history, art, architecture, and culture of ancient Romans, and the history department contributes to the study of more recent history with such courses as “Italian and European Fascism,” taught by Painter.

The Barbieri Endowment
After Italian studies courses gained momentum at Trinity, Campo turned his attention to extracurricular learning. In 1958, he helped secure a grant from the estate of Cesare Barbieri, an Italian inventor and industrial engineer. The resulting endowment established a respected scholarly journal as well as an annual lecture series, which has brought to campus a number of renowned scholars and distinguished figures in Italian culture, including the Italian ambassador to the United States. 

Alcorn, who serves as the endowment’s program coordinator, notes the Barbieri events have, from their inception, aimed to complement courses while appealing to a broad public audience. “A guiding principle is to show students that the things they study matter to the general public,” he says. In addition, Barbieri speakers give students insight into the world of scholarly research. “They are often the people behind the books we study in class,” Alcorn says.

Barbieri programs, like Trinity’s curriculum, portray all aspects of Italian history and culture. Upcoming events include a February 26 presentation by Susan Zuccotti, an independent scholar who has written two books on the Holocaust and is an expert on Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust; and an April celebration of the life and work of Italian physicist Enrico Fermi.

The Rome campus
Study in Rome has been integral to Trinity’s Italian programs since 1970, when Campo launched the Rome campus as a semester-abroad program that both met Trinity’s high standards for academics and offered an ideal base for experiential learning. Campo says he knew from personal experience that study abroad could profoundly affect one’s life and outlook. In founding the Rome campus, he hoped to provide others with that kind of opportunity.

Students and faculty who have ventured to the Rome campus say Campo had the right idea. Nat Silver ’02, who spent this fall at the Rome campus, describes the experience as “utopian,” from the beautiful convent where the campus is located to the amazing cultural icons within walking distance. 

Operating year-round, the Rome campus enrolls approximately 40 students per semester (about one third are Trinity students; the rest come from colleges and universities across the United States). Rome offers an ideal learning environment not only for students of Italian, but also for those studying art, music, history, literature, religion, and archaeology. The art history department, for example, encourages its majors to spend a semester in Rome, during which the students take courses, such as “Early Christian and Medieval Art,” that use the numerous churches and museums throughout the city as a walk-in textbook. 

All art history courses and most history courses include weekly three-hour sessions, Silver explained in an account of his Rome semester published in The Tripod this fall. “‘What is this beast of a three-hour class?’ you may ask. It is the walk. Each week we have ventured to a different corner of Rome with, for example, our Renaissance art class,” Silver wrote. Among the highlights were “a tour of the hidden gem Santa Maria in Trastevere with its original Cavallini mosaics of gold leaf and glass tiles dating back to the 13th century (and) a Thursday morning romp to St. Peter’s Basilica where, completely unexpectedly, we found ourselves in the midst of an audience with the Pope himself.”

The faculty of the Rome campus is composed of American and Italian scholars (pictured left: Walter Presegati, retired secretary general and treasurer of the Vatican Museums). Students and visiting faculty describe the Rome faculty as colorful, memorable individuals full of personality, motivation, and scholarship. Rome native and art historian Livio Pestilli has served as director of the Rome program for the last 20 years. Painter says anyone who has spent a semester at Trinity’s Rome campus in the last two decades will fondly remember Pestilli, who teaches in the program and also oversees all of the operations on the Rome campus. Pestilli lived in Rome until he was a teenager, when his family moved to Rochester, NY. He and his Italian-American wife moved back to Rome in the 1970s, and he and Campo met a few years later. Campo soon recruited him to join the Trinity program.

Each semester, a Trinity faculty member joins the teaching staff in Rome. It is an opportunity, Del Puppo notes, for faculty members to expand their own interests and teach material that is “tailored to the cultural setting.” Recently, members of the history, economics, political science, music, and English departments have participated. This semester, Hobart Professor of Classical Languages A. D. Macro is appropriately teaching a course on “Roman Drama: Comedy and Tragedy,” as well as a course in mythology. 

The Rome campus experience can be as invigorating and moving for faculty members as it is for students. Andrew J. Gold, chair of the economics department at Trinity, spent a semester in Rome last year. He recounts a powerful visit that three classes made to the Ardeantine Caves, where more than 300 Italians died in a World War II massacre. “We took a group of students to Via Rasella afterwards, the street on which the partisans had trapped and bombed a German unit that led to the reprisals in the Ardeantine Caves,” he says. “Walking that street and looking at the bullet holes that still pock-mark the building that the Germans shot up (the holes have been preserved) is to sear history into your brain.”

Vernon K. Krieble Professor of Chemistry Henry A. DePhillips, Jr., came away from a semester in Rome with a new academic focus. DePhillips had an interest in art conservation and taught a summer course on the subject at the Rome campus in 1983. At that time, such big projects as the restoration of the Sistine Chapel were taking place. “We could talk about these projects in the morning and then go and visit them in the afternoon,” DePhillips says.  Subsequently, DePhillips completely changed the direction of his research from protein chemistry to art conservation and preservation and began teaching a related course at Trinity called “Science in Art.” “It was a real catalyst,” he says of his experiences at the Rome campus.

Trinity-Italy connections continue to grow
While undergraduate education is the mission of Trinity’s Italian programs, Trinity’s connections with Italy have also spawned unanticipated positive consequences. In the early 1980s, for instance, the Rome campus’s excellent reputation paved the way for a collaboration between Trinity and Elderhostel, a nonprofit organization that facilitates educational and cultural mini-courses around the world for people who are 55 and older. In 17 sites all over Italy, Trinity annually operates more than 100 Elderhostel programs that are designed and carried out by Trinity staff and that serve more than 4,000 people a year. 

Trinity also continues to forge connections with ethnic Italians on this side of the Atlantic. The Italian-American caucus of the state legislature has cosponsored Barbieri events and provided scholarship funds for students to study at the Rome campus. Faculty members capitalize on the tremendous educational resource of the Italian-American community of Hartford. Alcorn brings students to Franklin Avenue’s Little Italy for his course on “Italy and America,” for example, and Del Puppo is planning to invite local Italian chefs to participate in his food history course. “More and more we are thinking in terms of what we can do with people in the community,” he says.

It’s no coincidence that the Italian government established a part-time vice consulate on campus six years ago. The office on Vernon Street assists Italian nationals in matters of property, passports, and citizenship, and it offers internships to Trinity students seeking to practice their language skills. Says Alcorn, “Trinity is physically a point of reference for the state in terms of official relations with Italy.” 

--Leslie Virostek