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The Italian Week (La Settimana Italiana) was a very successful series of events that took place on our campus between April 3-10, 2018. It was engineered and organized by our Dr. Riccarda Saggese, Associate Professor of Italian, and the Circolo Italiano (the UD Student Italian Club) and sponsored, besides the Italian Club, by the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Political Sciences and English. The week was comprised of four different events, each of which occurred on a different day. April 3rd was dedicated to one of the most practical and material aspects of the Italian Cuisine, Pasta Cooking Lesson, at the Thomas More Oratory; on April 5th, a vast audience of students watched the documentary Italian Americans, preceded by performances of Italian music; Dr. Stanislao G. Pugliese, Professor of Modern European History and Queensboro Unico Distinguished Professor of Italian and Italian Studies at Hofstra University, delivered a lecture on The Ironies of Italian American History to a packed on April 6th;,and last, but not least, April 10th was Career night: Insight on professions using the Italian language, devoted to the presentation, by UD Seniors and Alumni, of successful career paths enhanced by the study of Italian. The week concluded with the lively and highly informative presentation by Prof. Pugliese. He is the author, editor or translator of fifteen books, among which the recent ground-braking volume The Routledge History of Italian Americans, co-edited with William Connell. Dr. Pugliese offered an extensive and exhaustive panorama of the several ironies of Italian-American history that could be centered around three main ideas: the lack of national consciousness; the peculiarity of Italian Catholicism; the new Italian immigrants. Italy has been united (and only partially) as a country only in 1861 and the Italian cultural identity, free from the XIX century concept of nation, is still evolving.
