Outside the classroom, you’ll participate in a range of organized cocurricular activities and clubs designed to help you build new vocabulary while developing cultural fluency.

Students and faculty live under the same roof and take part in all the cultural and social activities, including film screenings, lectures, concerts, plays, dinners, soccer, volleyball, wine seminars, parties, club meetings and picnics. The following are just a few highlights:

Italian for Singers is designed for opera singers. Students will attend weekly laboratories and rehearsals that will include emphasis on proper Italian diction. Under the expert direction of Professor Zanardi, an all-student opera performance will be held at the end of the summer. For further information and additional application requirements, please contact the Italian School Assistant Director at italianschool@middlebury.edu.

Cooking workshops throughout the session allow students to learn how to prepare typical and regional Italian specialities, a native of Sicily with many years of restaurant experience in Italy.

Co-curricular Activities, Italian School

Middlebury is particular because at Middlebury they not only study the language, they live it. And I think that’s what makes the difference in terms of how quickly, and how well one acquires a new language. I’ve directed two other shows at the Italian Language School. And to this day, I have students who I’ve kept in touch with who say I still use the sentences that I learned in theater when I’m out and about in Italy every day.

Well, this is a very special year because it is the 200th anniversary of Giuseppe Verdi’s birth. So we’ve decided to celebrate his music and his life this year. So we’ll be putting together a show where we’ll have a lot of his music being sung by the choir. On top of the music, we’re also gonna be combining theater, so there’ll be actors.

This is an exercise in language education. The process that you try to keep in mind is that you want to create a show that they can be proud of. But at the same time, a show where they’ve been able to exercise their language skills during the rehearsal process.

And the great thing is that then what they learn there, they can also apply to their classes, their regular everyday classes. So it is the ultimate place to really learn a language.