Accademia

Italian language courses in Assisi since 1993.

The centre is open all year round to receive students, scholars and professionals from all over the world.
Universities, as well as numerous bodies and companies have entrusted the study and development of the Italian language in Italy to the courses held at the Accademia. Teaching is based on a method that grew out of research in applied linguistics and classroom experience, and took shape in the school’s own books: In italiano, from which RAI produced a video course broadcast in many countries, from the United States to Japan; Italiano in; and today In italiano. Il corso, published by Hoepli.

Since 2010 Gaia Chiuchiù has directed and coordinated the Italian and English language courses, and since 2000 Lorenzo Chiuchiù has directed and coordinated the creative writing courses.

Since 2000 all the Academy’s courses have been under the patronage of the Regional Council of Umbria and Council of Assisi.

In 2002 the Academy was recognized by the Ministry of Education and since 2008 has a partnership agreement with University of the Pacific, Elon University and Neumann University.

Summer programs University of the Pacific.
Partnership with Neumann University.
Under the high patronage of Assisi town council and Umbria Regional council.
Assisi is considered by UNESCO World Heritage site
Italian language courses officially recognized by the Italian Ministry of Education

Our team

The team of Accademia Lingua Italiana Assisi

Angelo Chiuchiù

Founder

Biography+

Previously a professor at the Università per Stranieri in Perugia from 1975 to 1994, has taught classes and held seminars, in Perugia, in second language methodology, set up by the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in both in-service programs and refresher courses. He has delivered pedagogical lectures on Italian as a second language all over the world: USA, Canada, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, Hong-Kong, Singapore, Germany, Austria, ex-Yugoslavia, Greece, Hungary, Russia, Malta, Tunisia, Albania, Spain, Portugal, France, Finland, Great Britain.

He has published articles on methodology and is author of numerous works: In italiano, a multimedia course (text, audio, handbooks in English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Russian, Rumanian, Hungarian, Polish, Korean, Chinese); the new Italiano in; Viva l’italiano, a multimedia course for children (four books, video), Le preposizioni, I verbi italiani, L’italiano al laboratorio linguistico, Et cetera, Quaderni d’italiano, Ambienti. He is consultant for the video courses In italiano e Viva l’italiano produced by the Italian Television (RAI) under the auspices of the Council of Ministers of Italy. He is author of Comunicare in italiano (Hoepli), In italiano. Il corso 1,2,3 (Hoepli)

Maria Grazia Caproni

Founder

Biography+

Biography coming soon.

Gaia Chiuchiù

Director of Studies: research, methodology and course design

Biography+

Gaia Chiuchiù received her MA in Linguistics in 1999 from the Università degli Studi di Perugia. Her experimental thesis contributed to the research for the first Italian draft of the European Language Portfolio, a project promoted by the Council of Europe that took place in Umbria from 1996 to 1999. In 2021 she earned her PhD in Second Language Acquisition from the University of Portsmouth (UK) with a study on the effects of structured input and input enhancement in the acquisition of the Italian subjunctive. Her primary research interest lies in the relationship between experimental research in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and L2 teaching.

At present she is responsible for the activities of research, experimentation and programming of the courses for the Accademia Lingua Italiana Assisi. She is the coordinator for the Accademia of Italian language and culture courses and of English language and culture courses. She published the series Arte e Metodo (Guerra Edizioni). She is author of Comunicare in italiano (Hoepli), In italiano. Il corso 1,2,3 (Hoepli) and Yidali, the first Italian language course for iPad (goWare).

In 2004 she taught Italian language and culture courses at the University of California at Santa Clara. From 2005 to 2009 she taught seminars in applied linguistics in Malta, Hungary, Poland, Greece, Sweden, Argentina, Uruguay, Croatia, Slovenia, Germany, Belgium, China, Spain, and Norway.

From 2000 to 2005 she translated into Italian texts of the American poet Murray Bodo, Icarus in Assisi (Minerva Edizioni), and the works of Albert Camus: L’artiste en prison (Davar I/2003), René Char (Davar II/2005), Metafisica cristiana e neoplatonismo (Diabasis, 2004), La devozione alla croce (Diabasis, 2005).

Lorenzo Chiuchiù

Teacher of philosophical and theological Italian, Director of Creative Writing Courses

Biography+

graduated in Aesthetics at the University of Florence under the supervision of Anna Giannatiempo Quinzio and Sergio Givone. He received a Ph.D in Philosophy and Sciences of the Text at the University of Siena.

He edited into Italian Métaphysique chrétienne et Néoplatonisme (Gallimard) and La dévotion à la Croix (Gallimard) by Albert Camus. He edited and translated into Italian Mallarmé, la lucidité et sa face d’ombre by Jean-Paul Sartre (Gallimard).

He published the collection of essays Atleti del fuoco (Mimesis). He published the books of poetry: Iride incendio (La Vita Felice), Sorteggio (Marietti 1820), Le parti del grido (Effigie). With Filippo Timi wrote the pièce Archivio degli universi possibili. He wrote the roman Esecuzione dell’ultimo giorno (Aguaplano). He published Res mystica, a study on Giorgio Colli (“Estetica. Studi e ricerche”, il Mulino, 2022).

http://www.lorenzochiuchiu.it

Michela Falcinelli

Teacher of Italian

Biography+

Biography coming soon.

Emanuela Faraglia

Pronunciation teacher

Biography+

She graduated as an actress in 1995 from the Centro Universitario Teatrale in Perugia, and went on to train in voice production techniques.

She works as a voice-over artist and dubbing actress (Cosmo, Le intervistone, TED Talks, multimedia products for Mondadori, Paravia, Zanichelli and D’Anna with SVR Studio). She has worked for Rai (Unomattina, Verdetto finale, La terza verità, Don Matteo, Al posto tuo) and Mediaset (Carabinieri, Sei forte maestro).

After several independent theatre productions, she began working as an actress with the Teatro Stabile di Parma and the Teatro Stabile di Torino. She also works as a performer in art exhibitions, installations and museums.

She has worked in Umbria since 1995 with companies of the national circuit, as an actress and as a trainer in workshops for schools, the public and social projects.

Silvia Nardinocchi

Teacher of Italian

Biography+

She graduated in Modern Languages and Literatures (linguistics and computing) from the University of Perugia. She lived in Spain for some years, where she furthered her study of Spanish and did research at the University of Santiago de Compostela.

She worked as a substitute teacher of Spanish in primary and secondary schools. In this role she also accompanied students to Spain for the Leonardo project, coordinated by the European Community, for learning Spanish.

She teaches Italian and Spanish and coordinates the Italian language courses and the certification exam preparation courses at the Accademia Lingua Italiana Assisi. She is a translator and Spanish language consultant for several companies, an examiner and interviewer for the PLIDA certification, and an interviewer for the Roma Tre and CILS certifications.

Digital teaching materials
Yidali 1-7 (goWare, Florence 2015)
.it 1-7 in Chinese, English, Arabic, Russian, Korean, German, Vietnamese (goWare, Florence 2015)
Self-correcting digital teaching materials on the Moodle platform for the Accademia Lingua Italiana Assisi

Maria Paciotti

Teacher of Italian

Biography+

She graduated in Communication Systems in International Relations from the Università per Stranieri di Perugia, where she also earned a Master’s in Teaching Italian as a non-native language and the DILS-PG level II certification.

She teaches Italian and Spanish and coordinates the Italian language courses and the certification exam preparation courses at the Accademia Lingua Italiana Assisi. She is an examiner and interviewer for the PLIDA certification and an interviewer for the Roma Tre and CILS certifications.

Daniele Palloni

Administration & Student Services

Biography+

Biography coming soon.

The Location

The school

The Accademia is housed in a fourteenth-century building in the historic centre of Assisi, at Via Santa Maria delle Rose 17, a few steps from Piazza del Comune and the Basilica of Santa Chiara. The architect Michele Bilancia restored it, keeping its old structure and adapting it to the school. All classrooms are air-conditioned.

Words born in Assisi

The Canticle1224–1225, the first poem by a known author in Italian literature

In the winter of 1224–1225, at San Damiano, Francis wrote the Canticle of Brother Sun, the oldest poem in Italian literature whose author we know. The earliest copy is still here, in the library of the Sacro Convento. With the Canticle, poetry leaves Latin for the vernacular: the road along which, with Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, the common language of Italians would be born.

DanteAssisi as the East

Less than a century later, Dante told the life of Francis in Canto XI of the Paradiso. If Francis is the sun, the place where he was born should not be called by its old name, Ascesi, but by the name of the point where the sun rises:

non dica Ascesi, ché direbbe corto, / ma Orïente, se proprio dir vuole (Par. XI, 53–54)
(“let no one call it Ascesi, which would say too little, but the East, if he would name it rightly”)

TravellersFrom Goethe to Jørgensen

Goethe reached Assisi in October 1786 and visited the Temple of Minerva, the first intact ancient monument he had ever seen; he did not go in to see Giotto. In 1874 John Ruskin spent weeks studying Giotto’s frescoes. In the same year Henry James, in an essay on the towns of central Italy, wrote that the church of St. Francis “is one of the very sacred places of Italy, and it would be hard to breathe anywhere an air more heavy with holiness.” In 1893 the French historian Paul Sabatier published his Life of Saint Francis; in Assisi he founded the International Society of Franciscan Studies in 1902 and was made an honorary citizen. The Danish poet Johannes Jørgensen, author of a celebrated biography of the saint, lived in Assisi for almost forty years.

The twentieth centuryFrom Hesse to Congdon

In 1904 Hermann Hesse wrote his Francis of Assisi: “He was a child and a poet, a master and a teacher of love, a humble friend and brother to every creature.”

In 1924 Nikos Kazantzakis met Jørgensen in Assisi, and years later, remembering that stay, he wrote God’s Pauper. For Kazantzakis, Francis is the man of a task that seems impossible: “to transform the matter God has entrusted to him into spirit.” To Brother Leo he says:

“We must have faith in the soul of man; don’t listen to sensible people, Brother Leo, the soul can do the impossible. You said: whoever lives with wolves must be a wolf, not a lamb; that is what you said, Brother Leo, that is what wise men say; but God has given me a madness, a new madness, and I say: whoever lives with wolves must be a lamb, and let them devour him! What is the name of that immortal thing inside us?” ‘The soul.’ “That, Brother Leo, they cannot devour.”

In her letter of 15 May 1942 to Father Joseph-Marie Perrin, Simone Weil wrote:

“In 1937 I spent two wonderful days in Assisi. There, alone in the little twelfth-century Romanesque chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli, an incomparable marvel of purity where Saint Francis often used to pray, something stronger than I was compelled me for the first time in my life to go down on my knees.”

In August 1955 J.R.R. Tolkien spent a week in Assisi with his daughter, guests of the French Poor Clares, while he corrected the proofs of The Lord of the Rings. Paul Celan gave the title Assisi to one of the poems in Threshold to Threshold (1955). The American painter William Congdon converted here in 1959 and worked here for twenty years.

Italian writersFrom Carducci to Pasolini

Giosue Carducci wrote a sonnet to Santa Maria degli Angeli. Gabriele d’Annunzio included Assisi among his Cities of Silence (1903); in a prose piece of 1897, written in Assisi, he has Illuminata say that “a kind of second sight is in all natural things.”

After the war the Pro Civitate Christiana drew writers and filmmakers: Giuseppe Ungaretti took part in its courses. In October 1962 Pier Paolo Pasolini, a guest at the Cittadella, read the Gospel of Matthew in a single night and decided to make it into a film; the following year he returned with Elsa Morante.