Natalie Bazata COL ’21.

“As I’ve heard many other students reflect, joining the Italian Department was undoubtedly the best decision I made at Georgetown. It has offered me opportunities that I would never have imagined and will never forget.”

During my first year at Georgetown, I got many puzzled looks and doubtful responses from those with whom I shared my Major plans: “Why not just study French or Spanish instead?”, “Don’t they speak English in Italy anyway?”, “Oh, that’s so clever to study Italian as a résumé booster!”. Despite such skepticism, I never doubted for a second my plans to major in Italian at Georgetown. After years dedicated to studying Italian on an unstoppable mission to learn the nearly lost family language of my great-grandparents, grasp the phrases in the Salerno dialect used by my grandfather, and decode the nearly illegible notes on the back of old family photos, it was my high school Italian teacher (Grazie di cuore, Signora Sperl) who instilled in me the dedication to take my studies of the language all the way to Georgetown where the Italian Department quickly became my ‘home’ at the university level.

As I’ve heard many other students reflect, joining the Italian Department was undoubtedly the best decision I made at Georgetown. It has offered me opportunities that I would never have imagined and will never forget. The close-knit, rigorous class environments beginning with Professor Musti’s Advanced Italian II course my freshman fall all the way to Professor Cicali’s Dante seminar my senior spring challenged me academically and led me to meet some of my closest friends and faculty mentors. I learned the ins and outs of Italian-English translation—a skill that has always fascinated me—in a course with Professor Melucci, studied detailed concepts in Italian applied linguistics and sociolinguistics with Professor De Fina which informed my thesis, and inspired additional curiosities in my Linguistics major, met weekly on Zoom with an Italian university student (who remains a close friend of mine to this day) in Professor Hipwell’s Teletandem course to practice our conversational skills and discuss hot topics in Italian and American popular culture, and studied the many complexities of Italian history, film, literature, and theater throughout a handful of fascinating courses with Professor Cicali.

Before the pandemic caused all study abroad programs in Spring 2020 to end, I was also very lucky to spend a full two months studying at L’Università di Bologna where I began taking courses on the history of the Italian language, translation theory, and language pedagogy alongside native Italian university students. With my program and with friends, I got to explore Bologna and visit other beautiful Italian cities like Verona, Napoli, Roma, Salerno, and even La Repubblica di San Marino. Although it was a short time abroad, these two months were my first time ever visiting Italy. Bologna had just begun to feel like a second home when I left, and I can’t wait to go back someday.

In addition to taking my last few classes for the Major, I spent my senior year in the Department researching and writing my Honors Thesis, which analyzes the attitudes and language ideologies expressed by Italian speakers via Twitter surrounding the use of feminine versions of job titles, such as avvocata or avvocatessa for avvocato (lawyer). Amongst the chaos of the pandemic, finishing this project seemed at times an impossible task, but I was proud to finally complete and defend my work this Spring. I owe endless thanks to Professor De Fina, Professor Pireddu, Professor Benedetti, and Professor Cicali for their tireless feedback, ideas, and encouragement throughout the project.

I graduated this Spring with a B.A. in Italian and Linguistics and will continue on a fifth year of study at Georgetown to complete my M.S. in Applied Linguistics. Thanks to the rigorous coursework and thesis research that I was able to complete and the bonds created during my time in the Italian Department, I am grateful to have built a toolbox of knowledge and further curiosities in Italian linguistics that I will carry with me throughout my graduate studies and beyond. I can’t thank each and every faculty member and peer in the Italian Department enough for how important they have been in shaping my experiences at Georgetown.