Memoria Presente: The Common Spanish Legacy in Italian and Latin American Cultures

A course revision project resulting in a digital repository of materials to facilitate cultural comparison in Italian language instruction for Spanish speakers and oral testimonies of Italian-Latino/a bicultural identity.The project Memoria Presente (i.e., 'present memory', which translates into the same expression in both Spanish and Italian) proposes the expansion of an existing course, 'Italian for Spanish Speakers,' to include advanced-level humanities content and a preliminary set of oral histories. The project leverages the cultural commonalities between Italy and Latin America as the result of shared colonial and migratory experiences which have affected numerous aspects of life. The goal is to organize materials from interdisciplinary sources that connect the linguistic and cultural experiences of Italy, Spain and Latin America and embed them in an advanced class so that Hispanic students can become further aware of trans-national affiliations rooted in a common past, and develop tri-lingualism and tri-culturalism through an accelerated path. A second goal is seeding a digital repository with resources that can be useful to other teachers for both existing classes and new extensions.