J-1 Term
Despite the rich history of Southern Italy, which was the center of Magna Graecia and whose inhabitants, the “Itali”, gave their name to the country, still today, students from the United States rarely choose Calabria as the destination for their study abroad programs. This is why we have decided to launch a program that promises to be a unique and truly rewarding experience. The program offers the opportunity to visit a region located in the center of the Mediterranean, less touristic than other areas of Italy, but equally beautiful and rich of natural and artistic treasures. In Calabria, the new Italian multiculturalism is livelier than elsewhere. Moreover, Calabria has been one of Italian regions most affected by emigration toward the US: as a result, thousands of Italian Americans have Calabrian origins.
Christmas holidays are a very intense time in Calabria. Epiphany on January 6th is a celebrated feast. The students will see nativities, Christmas lights, processions, and they will enjoy the local seasonal cuisine, traditional folk music and dances typical of this time of the year.
Students will interact with a selected group of students from the University of Calabria, and together they will carry out small group activities.
People
Dr. Martina di Florio
Dr. Margherita Ganeri
Dr. Marco Gatto
Field trips
Field trips are the highlights of our programs. Our Community-based mission is to focus on the South of Italy and on the importance of material culture and of historical heritage. These can only be fully understood by visiting specific locales, such as landscapes, spaces, and by experiencing the local food, music, and dance. We pursue an intersectional perspective that relies on the interpretative tools of gender, class and ethnicity, aiming at creating an all-encompassing learning, and also sensory, experience, in the real and cultural spaces of Southern Italy. Our goal is to promote a process of cognitive growth through immersion – visual, audible, linguistic, culinary – in the places, and to construct a pathway of experiential cultural formation, destined to change the image that participants have of Southern Italy and therefore of Italy itself.
The group will be hosted in the center of Cosenza. In classical antiquity, the “City of the Sun” was the capital of the Brettii, mixed-race from the ancient Greek settlers and the aboriginal Oenotrians. Today, it is the provincial capital, home to museums, churches, palaces, and architecture representing two thousand and five hundred years of history.
