Taking Italian at Wake?

ginnyvere
Wed, 23 Jun 2010 15:30:19 +0000

I’m not sure how much Italian you have to have to do the semester abroad. There were rumors that they were going to drop the requirement that students have the equivalent of two semesters of Italian before spending the semester at Casa Artom, but I don’t know if they have dropped that requirement. Either way, you’ll take a semester of Italian while you’re there.

Wake Forest owns houses in London, Vienna, and Venice. I don’t know as much about the London and Vienna houses, but each semester a professor (and often his/her family) and 15-20 students go to Casa Artom. While there, the students take an Italian language course, an art history course (with field trips!), and two courses from the Wake Forest professor’s discipline. You’ll know well in advance what professor is going from Wake, so you’ll know what courses you’ll take while you’re over there. The house is right on the Grand Canal. It’s about a ~15 minute walk from Piazza San Marco, and it’s about 20-25 minutes from the train station and the bus station, so you can travel to towns outside of Venice very easily.

You’re considered to be attending Wake Forest and living in Wake Forest housing (it’s the best dorm you’ll ever live in), so all your tuition payments and things like that work just like they would if you were doing the semester in Winston-Salem. Inside the house, there are two classrooms, a library, a living room, dining room, and kitchen, so there’s plenty of space to hang out and study.

There’s no end to the wonderful experiences that I had abroad. In addition to getting to see a lot of Italy (and some of the rest of Europe) and learning Italian pretty well, all the students got to be really pretty close. By far my best experience of college.

As for studying Italian after studying Latin, I don’t actually know anyone who did that, but I can’t imagine that it’s going to be a lot more difficult than coming from either French or Spanish. The cognates that exist in those languages still exist, of course. It might feel odd for you at the beginning because there’s naturally going to be a lot more emphasis on speaking the language than there was in Latin. Other than that, I don’t think it would be much of a problem.