Why study Italian?

Apart from helping you acquire a useful skill and an understanding of another culture, study of a foreign language can be a transformative experience, changing the way you think not only about your own culture, but about yourself and your place in the world. Study a foreign language, and stick with it! But why study Italian?
  • A knowledge of Italian is important for people in the arts, technology, business and many professions. It is also useful for students planning careers in art history, music, linguistics, education and international relations.
  • Italian is the fourth language most spoken in US homes, according to the US Census Bureau. It is also spoken in Switzerland, parts of Africa, the Balkans, and the island of Malta.
  • Italy is world leader in the culinary arts, interior design, fashion, graphic design, furniture design, etc. Those planning careers in these fields benefit greatly from knowing Italian.
  • Italy has a great tradition of volunteerism and political activism.
  • Art historians need Italian. Italy is filled with the world's greatest art treasures.
  • Italy is a world leader in advanced technologies in robotics, electromechanical machinery, shipbuilding, space engineering, construction machinery, and transportation equipment.
  • Italy has long been a magnet for the tourism industry: millions and millions of people visit Italy every year.
  • By studying Italian you can learn some surprising things about your own culture.
  • A TRIP TO ITALY CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE!

Over the centuries, Italy has produced some of the most remarkable cultural works in the western canon, from the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri to Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, from The Prince of Niccolò Machiavelli to the neo-realist films of Vittorio De Sica, and from Baldassarre Castiglione's The Courtier to the post-modernist novels of Italo Calvino. Historically, too, Italy has always been of great importance. In the Middle Ages cities such as Florence and Venice were among the richest and most powerful of Europe; it was Italy that produced the Renaissance, the culture and values of which have provided the foundations of much of western life in the last five hundred years; in the nineteenth century it provided one of the most exciting and inspiring examples of movement of national unification, while in the twentieth century it gave rise to the political system known as fascism. Knowledge of the Italian language affords access to one of the West's richest cultural traditions as well as to one of Europe's most vital contemporary societies.