About the Book
Percorsi has quickly become one of the best-selling elementary Italian programs of its kind. The new Third Edition features Ritorno a Roma, an educational romantic comedy filmed on location in Rome, Siena, and Naples, a vibrant new design, even more focus on skill-development, updated cultural information, and expansion of MyItalianLab.
Percorsi promotes the acquisition of Italian language and culture through a media-rich program that integrates the "five C's" principles of the National Standards for Foreign Language Education. Building on the success of earlier editions, the
Third Edition is designed to provide beginning learners with a variety of tools to develop their communicative competence in the four major language skill area--listening, speaking, reading, and writing--as they acquire familiarity with Italian culture. At its core is a brand new film,
Ritorno a Roma. Produced by the 2012 Golden Globe winner for Best Short,
Ritorno a Roma is the first educational romantic comedy created exclusively for learners of beginning Italian. The film, created to support the learning of Italian for users of
Percorsi and exclusively written with students in mind, takes place in Roma and features scenes in Roma, Gaeta, Napoli, and Siena. It follows the trials and tribulations of four main characters--Taylor, Giulia, Elena, and Roberto--as Roberto attempts to win a national recording contract for the band that he manages.
Ritorno a Roma provides an engaging, natural context for the practice of structure and vocabulary, while introducing students to colloquial language and providing them a firsthand look at Italian life and culture.
About the Author:
Francesca Italiano is the Director of the Italian Language Program at the University of Southern California. She has a Ph.D. from University of California, Los Angeles in Nineteenth Century Italian Literature and an M.S. from USC in Applied Linguistics. She is the coauthor of the literary reader
Incontri Attuali and the author of the second edition of the intermediate program,
Crescendo! She is currently working with the USC Language Center in the development of the VIE (Virtual Italian Experience) video game, which is based on
Percorsi. The VIE project is being funded by a two-year NEH grant.
Irene Marchegiani is currently Coordinator of Student Teaching for European Languages at Stony Brook University, where she teaches second language acquisition methodology courses as well as courses in European Studies. Professor Marchegiani has taught Italian language, literature, and culture at all levels and has authored articles on contemporary Italian poetry, with a particular emphasis on women writers. She has conducted research and published articles on Italian epic poems and translated Torquato Tasso's
Aminta, which was awarded the prestigious "Diego Valeri" Monselice prize in 2002. With Francesca Italiano, she published the literary reader
Incontri Attuali and the intermediate Italian program,
Crescendo.
