Italian

The Elementary Italian course provides students with the essential language skills to communicate effectively in common Italian contexts, covering the first level of Italian proficiency. Through a communicative approach and a strong emphasis on active participation, it helps students to quickly improve their ability to interact with Italians. Engaging in role-playing, group work, in and out of class task-based activities and oral and written tests, learners are immersed in the Italian language, reinforcing their listening, speaking, reading and writing abilities. Assignments and projects deepen their understanding of Florentine life and Italian culture. By the end of the course, students acquire foundational language skills as well as insights into Italy's rich cultural tapestry. 

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course analyzes the genealogy of the relationship power-opinion-public-democracy, which is constituted in political modernity, observing its genesis, its aporias, its theoretical and historical transformations. At the end of the course, the student: is familiar with the political authors who have contributed to the reflection on this relationship; is able to understand the dialectic it establishes with other concepts of political modernity, such as domination, representation, freedom, both with respect to the crisis and to the new potentialities that the articulation of power-public-opinion-democracy is experiencing in the era of the digital revolution; is able to apply these categories to the analysis of the present . The course examines the nature, structure, and critical role of public opinion and its relation with political and social institutions in the 19th century. It includes readings by some of the most important political thinkers on the relationship between democracy and public opinion, like Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill. The course analyzes the social and political transformations enabled in public opinion by the process of democratization during 20th century with the help of authors like Tarde, Bentley, Lippmann, Dewey, and Hannah Arendt. During the second part, the course uses authors like Adorno and Marcuse, Lazersfeld and Kaplan, Debord, Habermas, Baudrillard, and Bourdieu to understand the new political configurations of the public opinion in the age of mass democracy; finally, the course analyzes the crisis of public opinion in the age of globalization, the age of information, the show society age, the post-truth and fake news age, and the possibility for public opinion in contemporary democracies to gain (or not) a new political role.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. Geography, gender, and ethic is an advanced course of cultural geography. The course provides in-depth and critical knowledge of topics and perspectives that lie at the core of contemporary geographical debates, such as gender studies and ethical issues. The course provides an understanding of these subjects and perspectives within today’s geographical debates as well as the intersection of these topics and other fundamental topics in the field of cultural geographies, such as mobility. The course addresses two main thematic pathways: 1) contemporary evolution of feminist and gender debates in the geographical field. 2) the intersection between gender geographies and ethics. The topics addressed include: feminisms, methodology, and ethics in geographical research; concept of positionality; contribution of feminist and gender studies to ethical issues concerning, for example, subjectivity, difference, and the overcoming of culture/nature; feminisms, transfeminisms, and more-than-human and posthuman geographies; geographies, feminisms, and concepts such as "trans-species"; and ecofeminisms.

This course provides general knowledge of Italian contemporary history and the main interpretations of it. The course prepares students to transmit the knowledge acquired, adopting the appropriate vocabulary and being versed in the historiographical debate. It covers the methodologies used by the research on social classes including basic mass culture and consumption phenomena. It provides awareness of how sources and choice of methodology bear on the ultimate result. The course covers: Italy from the First to the Second Republic; the main political, economic, and social junctures that represented the framework within which the democratic political system was reconstituted in Italy in the aftermath of the Second World War; the institutional as well as the economic and social framework, always keeping the international context as a reference perspective; the various moments that have marked the history of the Italian peninsula since the Second World War, from reconstruction to the economic boom, from the years of revolts and movements to the crisis of the First Republic and of that party system that had contributed to rewriting the democratic political framework. Finally, attention is focused on the different generations of men and women who were protagonists of that history.

This course offers students the possibility to grow the knowledge and skills necessary to recognize, describe, and interpret structural and tectonic features at all scales of observation, and how to use structural geology to constrain tectonic and geodynamic scenarios recorded in the rock record. After completing the course, students are able to: recognize, measure, and plot the geometric features of a significant variety of geological structures, from the outcrop to the regional scale; understand the mechanics of deformation and assess the dynamic and kinematic framework within which deformation and strain localization have taken place; reconstruct modes and timing of deformation; and decipher the geodynamic environments that govern the first-order evolution of our Planet. Teaching includes a combination of theory lessons, practical sessions and one excursion to deformed areas of the Northern Apennines.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. At the end of the seminar, the student improves the knowledge of the Italian grammar. The student obtains the necessary linguistic abilities to understand and to analyze complex texts, as literary texts and related to the specialist bibliographies about the disciplinary area of the courses. The student is able to create texts in order to expose complex contents. The class is structured around the following activities: the analysis of Italian language through the study of literary texts and essays; an introduction to the reading of main bibliography of the courses in the first year of IS; producing texts and cultural and professional projects; commentaries and analysis of academic texts such as book, film, and art exhibition reviews and descriptions; and a focus on oral exposure aimed the presentation of cultural projects, events, shows, and exhibits. Students must have completed the equivalent of two or more years of university-level Italian language study as a prerequisite for this course.

A working knowledge of regional geology represents the basis for any practical application of geology, including land planning, engineering geology, and the sustainable development of mineral, hydrocarbon, and water resources. This course provides the student with a modern synthesis of the geology of Italy in view of its many practical applications. The course discusses topics including the main geophysical features of the Italian peninsula and the adjacent marine basins; and the main Italian geological domains: the Alpine orogen, the Corsica-Sardinia block, the Calabria-Peloritani terrane, the Apennines, the Apulia and Hyblean platforms, the geology of Sicily, and the Quaternary.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. There are two versions of this course; this course, UCEAP Course Number 152B and Bologna course number 93217, is associated with the LM in Geography and Territorial Processes degree programme. The other version, UCEAP Course Number 152A and Bologna course number 90543, is associated with the LM in Sociology and Social Work degree programme.

At the end of the course, students are able to: have a general overview of international migrations, their main interpretative models, and some related issues; and manage the main concepts for the study of migrations, without limiting to the classic economy and the demography ones, but paying attention also to some most recent approaches. The course provides the main conceptual and analytical tools for a sociological analysis of migrations, presenting the most accredited interpretation models, the most recent trends, and the social impact of this phenomenon in the Mediterranean area. The first part of this course considers the figure of the stranger and the interaction models with society as it emerges from the classical sociological debate (Simmel, Park, Thomas). The second part introduces the contemporary debate on international migrations and the interpretation models of this phenomenon from different disciplines. Special attention is given to: 1. theoretical contributions from the Chicago School of sociology in the 1920s; 2. considering migrations as a "total social fact," according to the Algerian sociologist A. Sayad; and 3. interethnic and cohabitation relations in urban settings. During the Laboratory experts and workers of the socio-sanitary field present their professional experience, in order to enlarge the debate with students about the main issues of the course of sociology of migrations.

This course is for people with a basic knowledge of Italian and for people who have completed level A1. An intake is necessary when you do not have a recent A1 certificate. The course builds vocabulary and understanding of how the language works. Traditional learning materials as well as online learning tools, such as Google Classroom and social media are used. Although the content of the course especially focuses on speaking skills, additional work on reading, listening, writing, and grammar supports the language learning process. The teacher is a native speaker, and the group lessons are conducted in Italian. Instructions is only be given in English if it's necessary.

The Pre-A1 Italian language course is the first contact level students have with the language, it is suggested to learners who could have great difficulties because they speak non-European languages or a very different language from Italian. In this level students learn how to communicate in daily routine using fixed expressions. The course consists of discussing communicative functions including introducing oneself and talking about oneself (name, age, university study, nationality, address, place of living, mobile phone number); saying and asking for personal information; greeting and answering greetings; saying thanks and replying; apologizing and replying to apologies; looking for and asking for information in daily life (place to go to, price and cost); asking and saying the time; asking and saying the date; being formal and informal; asking and understanding information about the Italian language: What's the Italian for "x"?, How do you spell "x"?, What does "x" mean?