WILLIAMSBURG— The Colonial Italian American Organization (CIAO) is continuing to share Italian culture with its members. One of the ways it achieves this is through the Italian classes it offers its members.
CIAO offers two levels of Italian classes for its members. The first is designed to be an introductory course called Situational Italian, and the second is Tavola Rotonda, which is a more advanced class for participants who know a fair to good amount of Italian already.
The Situational Italian class has two classes a month for 10 months and is designed for people who might want to take a trip to Italy, focusing on words and phrases that would commonly be used when traveling on vacation. The class is taught by Pasquale Di Giacomo, who is a second-generation Italian and is currently in its second class.
When Di Giacomo’s parents came over from Italy, they didn’t speak English. So his introduction to English was through everyday situations and going to school. CIAO says he approaches his class like that, where his students are immigrants moving to Italy and cannot speak any Italian.
“We had this lady who just recently joined, and after she took the first class, she sent a note to us and said, she just wanted to say that she learned more in the first hour of the Situational Italian class than she had in three years of working with Duolingo and working with a private tutor,” said Carmen Andreoli, the president of CIAO.
Tavola Rotonda is designed for people who have a more advanced understanding of the Italian language, such as it as their it being first language, have taken Italian classes before, lived in Italy for a while, and just want to keep up their skill sets. The whole class is done in Italian, conversing back and forth and reading articles. This particular class was noted by CIAO to have been going on for around a decade.
June will be when the Situational Italian class is looking to start its next class. All of the Italian classes are free to members of CIAO. Currently, the organization has 155 members, and of those members, 50 of the members are participating in these two classes.
CIAO says its members comprise all ages and diverse cultural backgrounds, united by love for Italian life: food, wine, art, music, theatre, and a desire to cultivate friendships.
To learn about CIAO and its various events, including the returning Meatball Contest, please visit the official CIAO website.
