The course includes one or two on site classes. The course material is a one-year program divided in two independent semesters for the fall and spring. StudentsвЂ™ travel and also trips organized by the Rome Center are taken into consideration in the development of the course content for each semester. StudentsвЂ™ active participation in the making and development of the course with their living experiences in the country will allow them to witness first hand and consequently to critique the many facets of Italian life.Д¬lass material will also focus on the current semester activities. The course will provide a unified picture of Italy but also its regional differences and varieties. A dynamic propulsion between past and present will help shape and define a picture of modern Italy. The study of the country, its tradition as well, will be presented through a selection of topics viewed within their historical development. To all this we must add that the Italian Culture does not express itself at home or abroad, as it did in the past, only through literary texts, but also through other channels such as gastronomy, cinema, music, etc. For this reason we can deal with usage and costumes of the life of modern Italians, whether by modern we mean either a break or continuity with the past. So, besides an outline of a culture historically meant, it will also consider present days. The division into regions and their histories witness the cultural and folk variety.Д¬ulture is also todayвЂ™s living. These preliminary remarks do not mean that, during the course, the differences that exist within Italy, as in any other country, are not taken into consideration. In doing so he is able to establish the importance of the Italian culture so as to analyze all the aspects which are part of it, from the people to painting, architecture and literature from philosophy to mathematics, religion, gastronomy, up to the point of taking into consideration the countryвЂ™s physical features, such as the city, for example. If Giuliano Procacci, Storia degli Italiani, talks of Italy and the history of Italians in relation to the European Culture, Travaglia broadens the view by going beyond Europe and relating Italy to non-western cultures, so placing the Italian вЂњproductвЂќ on a world scale and using not only the cultural past but also the present. Sergio Travaglia in Maledetti Italiani moves from this position with details as to reach statements of an economic type: culture is treated like an item for sale and everything depends on how well it can be sold, production and national artistic patrimony are the strongholds of our mission. Luigi Barzini in his The Italians had already mentioned a discrepancy between the truthfulness and the image of the country. The book by Enzo Biagi, LвЂ™Italia dei Peccatori, witnesses the change that occurred in our country, which do not seem to find an equivalent in the official culture brought abroad. Long ago Prezzolini in his book, The Legacy of Italy, has shown how the aspects of the highest Italian Civilization were universal and not only national, so that they were able to fulfill the yearnings of other peoples, not specifically only of the Italians. To talk about Italian Culture and Civilization starting from the differences between the North and South, or from the various regions, one might fall into triteness.

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