FACULTY
Nicholas Patruno
Co-Director and Professor of Italian Emeritus, Bryn Mawr College
Phone: 610-526-5047
e-mail: npatruno@brynmawr.edu
Roberta Ricci
Co-Director and Assistant
Professor of Italian, Bryn Mawr College
Phone: 610-526-5048
e-mail: rricci@brynmawr.edu
Nicholas Patruno retired in May 2008 after almost 40 years of service. His main academic interests focus on 19th and 20th century Italian literature, translation, and on the pedagogical aspect of language teaching (with the aid of computers). He has 
published works on Giovanni Verga, Elio Vittorini, Eugenio Montale and on Primo Levi. His most recent work deals with Primo Levi and Italian women voices of the Holocaust. His book, Understanding Primo Levi(University of South Carolina Press, 1995) originated with a call from the press. He has appeared on NBC's The Today Show tocomment on Primo Levi's life. Professor Patruno's teaching has been recognized by a prize awarded by the American Institute for Italian Culture for "outstanding teaching at the college level" and more recently, by the American Association of Teachers of Italian of the Delaware Valley and vicinity. His research has been supported by the American Philosophical Society. He has directed the Bryn Mawr-University of Pennsylvania Summer Institute in Florence, Italy, for several years and is the Co-Director of the Summer Study in Pisa Program.
Roberta Ricci received her Ph.D. in Italian Literature from Johns Hopkins University, after a Laurea in Lettere Moderne (summa cum laude) at the University of Pisa with an interdisciplinary study in the 
Twentieth-Century European avant-garde (literature, music and art). Her academic interests are Medieval prose and poetry, Renaissance Studies, Women's Studies, Modern Italian Fiction, Critical Theory, and Paratexts. She has published articles on the Latin elegy, Boccaccio, Tasso, Ariosto, Female Renaissance Epistolography, and on 20th century Italian authors, such as Alberto Savinio, Italo Svevo, and Carlo Emilio Gadda, among others.
COURSES
Students are required to register for two credit units (either for a two-credit unit course or for two one-credit unit courses)
• Italian S 001-002
Elementary Italian (1 credit unit)
For beginners who wish to complete the equivalent of one year of elementary Italian (staff)
• Italian S I 001-002
Intensive Elementary Italian (2 credit units)
For beginners who wish to complete the equivalent of one year of elementary Italian (Patruno, Ricci, staff)
• Italian S 101-102
Intensive Intermediate Italian (2 credit units)
For students with one year of Italian and wish to complete the equivalent of second year of Italian (will count to fulfill language requirement at Bryn Mawr) (Patruno, Ricci, Staff)
• Italian S 225
Italy at War: 20th Century Italian Literature and Cinema (1 credit unit; taught in English)
This course examines the flowering of Italian cinema after World War II and its transformation in the 1960s by focusing on the best work of leading directors. We will explore the historical, social, and theoretical roots of Neorealism evidenced by Italian films throughout the 1900s and the different ways each of the directors participated in this movement and was in turn influenced by it. The course is structured upon the idea that literature and films can be used as an approach to studying a society’s history and culture, including such things as customs, ideologies, discourses, gender roles and social problems. We will study, through close textual analysis, such issues as Fascism, ideas of nationhood, gender, sexuality, politics, regionalism, death, and family in the Italian context. As the course progresses, we will attempt to discuss later movies in relation to some of the ideas and conventions that appear in early modern Italian cinema. Students first will become acquainted with the literary source through a careful reading; on viewing the corresponding film, students will consider how narrative and descriptive textual elements are transposed into cinematic audio/visual elements. Our main objective will be, rather than comparing, to explore the more complex relation between literature and cinema: how text is put into film, how cultural references operate with respect to issues of style, technique, and perspective. We will discuss how cinema conditions literary imagination, and how literature leaves its imprint on cinema. We will "read" films as "literary images" and "see" novels as "visual stories".
• Art History (1 credit unit)
The Art of Pisa and Tuscany (1 credit unit) This course will focus on the art in Pisa and in other places in Tuscany, primarily Florence. There is no substitute for art to be appreciated in situ. (Jennifer Byrd)
