Umbra Students Meet Italian Cinema Star
After watching his work in “La Meglio Gioventù” for an Umbra Institute class, students attended a lecture by Italy’s beloved actor Luigi Lo Cascio at l’Università per Stranieri di Perugia last week.
“I stayed the whole time and was able to go get a picture and chat with Luigi a little bit — it was great,” said Effie Morway. “We just finished ‘La Meglio Gioventù’ the day before, so it was amazing to be able to see this famous actor in person right afterwards. He has been in a few of the movies we watched, and we really enjoy his work — he seems quite big in the Italian film world now.”
Morway and her classmates watched the film for Dr. Elgin Eckert’s course, “Blockbusters and Bestsellers: Italian Cinema and Literature of the Twenty-First Century.”
“It was great to see that the Italian cinema and literature course inspired several of my students to move out of their ‘comfort zone’ and attend an academic lecture held in Italian, a language several of them have only begun to study here at Umbra this semester, at an Italian university out of their own initiative,” Eckert said. “Perugia and its two Italian universities offer a lot of great opportunities of this type, and because of its manageable size and the frequent interactions of Umbra Institute’s students with local students, partaking in university classes and special lectures is a distinct possibility.”