Scuola Insieme: Reviews of the School

Students well know that some of the best learning happens on a beach or at a café.

So does Stanford graduate Francesca Mattiussi-Seaman, who runs an Italian language program on her native island of Grado. For four summer weeks, a handful of Americas come to the island off Venice to learn Italian at the beach, the theater, gelati shops and Mattiussi-Seaman's home.

It's the immersion method at its peak. Grado (population 9,000), is an untouristed spec whose length can be walked in under two hours and width in 10 minutes. No one speaks English, everybody knows everybody else (including Mattiussi-Seaman) and the big business is fishing, Mattiussi-Seaman said.

"It's extremely traditional," she said. "Women stay home. The atmosphere is very intimate." Her students, then, attract attention because they're oddities. At Mattiussi-Seaman's home, the students read medieval poems to learn pronunciation and grammar, listen to opera arias and write simple compositions. Mattiussi-Seaman, 26, uses flash-cards, gestures and props. She might set out vegetables and plates, for instance, to simulate a restaurant.

"I don't get them into fake Italian, where it's academic and all slowed down," she said. "I only speak English when in an emergency." The class goes to the market, to Grado's 1,400-year-old church, outdoor cafes, the harbor, movies and concerts. They play pick-up basketball and make excursions to Venice and Trieste. "I treat them as if they were friends visiting me," Mattiussi-Seaman said. "What's unusual about it is that an undergrad started it," said professor Jeffrey Schnapp, chairman of Stanford's Italian Studies Program and Mattiussi-Seaman's thesis advisor. "It's a very small-scale kind of approach located in an unusual location." The inevitable cultural gaps have surfaced. One student at a restaurant asked to take the left-overs home. The waiter looked at him curiously, cleared the table, returned with a plastic bag with a pasta-chicken-bones mess and announced, "Here it is, for your dog." "In Italy, we don't ask for the food to take home," Mattiussi-Seaman said.

She warned her class that Italians "are very physical people" who may greet each other with a kiss or hug. The students followed that instruction by kissing a repairman who came to the home, she recalled with a laugh. Mattiussi-Seaman started the program a year ago because she was dissatisfied with the more common ways of learning language. She had studied French in France, but after the three-hour class, she and the other foreign students would hang out with non-French-speaking people. She has taught Italian at California State University-Fresno and at an Atherton Private School. On Grado, her students live with families or in hotels. "An Italian family is loud, there are a lot of things going on, it's fast-moving," she said. "Not everybody can get used to Italy all at once," she said.

Tuition is $1,450. Last summer, the class was made up of Stanford students and a parent. This summer's sessions started Sunday and include a Woodside psychologist, a retired Carmel architect and his wife, two Stanford students and an Art History graduate student at California State University, Fresno. News of the school has spread largely by word of mouth. Now Glamour magazine is planning an article about Mattiussi-Seaman in its August issue, she says. "It's really blowing out of proportion. It was supposed to be a little thing where I entertained myself and entertained a few other people," said Mattiussi-Seaman, a comparative literature major who starts graduate studies at UCLA this fall. "It's exhausting and exhilarating."

Note: Certain changes have been made to the school since this article appeared.

Scuola Insieme, LLC
Via Leopardi, 37
Grado (GO) 34073 Italia
tel. (39) 0431.876.311
fax (39) 0431.876.591 Scuola Insieme, LLC - USA Office
PO Box 808
Greencastle, IN 46135 USA
tel. (765) 653-1430
fax (765) 653-1431