Monday Feb 21st

Today we had Shara Wasserman, a guest speaker from Temple University come speak to our class. She brought up a lot of interesting issues concerning contemporary Italy and the current Italian society. There were a lot statistics discussed that illustrated Italy’s dire state. One such interesting statistic talked about how only twelve percent of males finish university. Her talk brought a lot of attention to the fact that a great deal must be done in order to solve the crisis going on in Italy.

We then moved into working on our art piece to describe our personal views about Italy. We could draw from our own personal views on Italy, the stories from Multicultural Literature in Italy or depict our own personal frame of reference. Such examples include Brenda’s portrait of herself with the phrase “see past my shades, I dare you” written and depictions of both the Mexican and American flags. In this drawing she was representing the way she saw herself. In Germaine’s drawing, she depicted an eyes with different figures representing the way she saw Italy. In her eye, there was a Vespa, a man praying and a cappuccino. This was a very different way of portraying her views of herself and Italy. An even different way of drawing could be seen by looking at Jenny’s drawing. In her drawing, she depicted the “light beer and peanuts” story that we read about in Multicultural Literature in Italy. There was a young girl confused with her identity with half of her hair straight, half her skin dark and lettering surrounding her portrait. These are all very different representations of illustrating views about Italy and ourselves. After this activity, we had a low key afternoon where we could catch up on things and later individual check ins. In the end, this was a day where we were able to discuss our own personal findings on Italy in a new way as well as hear a new voice and views from Shara.