Photo by Tara Monastesse ‘25.
By Tara Monastesse ’25
Managing Editor of Content
As part of an ongoing mission to strengthen the offerings of Mount Holyoke College’s Italian department, the College recently hosted two education directors from nearby Italian consulates.
Ivana Marroncelli, education office director at the Consulate General of Italy in Boston, and Patrizia Calanchini Monti, education office director at the Consulate General of Italy in Philadelphia, visited Mount Holyoke’s campus on Nov. 20 to participate in the Five College Pedagogy Symposium in the Ciruti Language Center, as well as familiarize themselves with the College’s current Italian program and its historical ties to Italian history.
The annual Five College Pedagogy Symposium brings together Italian language faculty from Mount Holyoke, Smith College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst to discuss potential improvements for each institution’s Italian language program. By working with nearby Italian Consulate locations, the Department of Classics and Italian at Mount Holyoke hopes to expand its course offerings, invite guest speakers to campus, gain access to more funding opportunities and discover internship opportunities both abroad and in the United States.
“The purpose [of the visit] was to foster a sense of collaboration, to show [the Consulate] resources that we have and see how we can work together to provide more opportunity for our students and faculty,” Morena Svaldi, senior lecturer in Italian and faculty director of the Language Assistant Program at the College, said in an interview with Mount Holyoke News. A previous grant from the Italian government made it possible for Svaldi to teach a course called “Italian Excellence: Science, Arts, Design” at Mount Holyoke during the spring 2022 semester.
“The experiences that the students can have coming in direct contact with an Italian reality can show how important it is to know another language,” Marroncelli said in an interview with Mount Holyoke News. “It opens the door to so many new experiences that you as a student can do, and to discover the new vision of Italy — not only [in] the traditional way but also the innovative areas in which Italy is prominent today.”
The visit also included a stop at the Archives and Special Collections in Dwight Hall, a tour of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and an opportunity to sit in on a teaching of an Italian course.
Ombretta Frau, the College’s Dorothy Rooke McCulloch professor of Italian, worked with Svaldi to organize the consulate representatives’ visit and accompanied them upon their arrival. Their planning included a collaboration with the Archives and Special Collections to bring out a display of objects from the Valentine Giamatti collection.
This collection includes the belongings of Valentine Giamatti, a prolific Italian professor who played a significant role in broadening the College’s Italian program offerings during the mid-20th century. He left an extensive collection of antique copies of Dante’s Divine Comedy to Mount Holyoke upon his retirement in 1973, which Marroncelli and Monti were invited to browse. Frau, who has worked extensively with this collection in the past, said it was important to take the consulate visitors to the archives to show them that, on Mount Holyoke’s campus, “there is a little piece of Italian intellectual history, too.”
“I think it is still a little bit unknown, the kind of relationship that the United States has with Italian culture,” Frau said. “It was important for us to show that Mount Holyoke was part of this big cultural phenomenon.”
The consulate members also visited the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, where they viewed modern art displays and traditional Mediterranean art. In the afternoon, they observed a course taught by Frau titled “Introduction to Italian Culture and Literature I: 'Italian Food Culture.”
Marroncelli and Monti were both first-time visitors to Mount Holyoke’s campus.
“I really find [the campus] is a jewel in itself because it's really compact,” Monti said. “There's a lot of really wonderful pieces in the museum [and] in the [Williston Memorial] Library. And I wasn't expecting that, to see editions from Dante dating back to the 15th century. That was really fascinating.”