Customer Reviews

Italia Contemporanea: Conversations with Native Speakers (Yale Language Series)

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Well, I thought this was a great product and it would have been except it did not come with the DVD. Without the recorded conversations, this is just another reader without any reference material. Called AMazon upon recieving it and they really did not help so now I have a book of conversations that I cannot listen to. Don't buy it unless Amazon has it with the DVD!

Beginners and advanced students of Italian alike will enjoy the authentic, unrehearsed, and thoroughly fascinating interviews presented in the DVD accompanying the book Italia Contemporanea: Conversations with Native Speakers by Ceil Lucas.

Each interview focuses on aspects of everyday Italian life: work, housing, soccer, poetry, the role of women in Italian society, politics, the use of language, and many other lively topics. The speakers offer a variety of regional accents, including Florentine, Milanese and Roman.

Italia Contemporanea is populated with unforgettable characters, including a farmer, a mechanic, a neurologist, a journalist, a nurse, and a secretary. You will meet a 77 year-old woman who recounts a moving incident during WWII in which she traded her starving family's last possession, a bike, for what she was told was a sack of flour. (We won't spoil the surprise by revealing the actual contents of the sack.)
As you listen to these ordinary Italians, you come away with a sense of their passion for their work, their culture, their language. Along the way you invariably you hear their strong opinions.

If you are Italian American, you will want to watch this DVD with your children and grandchildren. There are multiple lessons contained in this video, as it captures the Italian language in its essence with the colors and sounds of an Italia that is growing and changing slowly but relentlessly.

The 85-minute long DVD contains fifty-one interviews, divided among twenty chapters. It is accompanied by a video manual that includes complete transcripts of each interview, as well as notes about vocabulary, grammar and usage, and questions about the content of the interviews. An interactive feature is a series of questions about the student's own experience.

This is simply a wonderful way to learn Italian!

My continuing education class in Italian is using this book as its textbook. I read the description carefully to make sure the DVD was included, and made the purchase. When I received the book, there was no DVD. I returned the book to Amazon, and purchased it from the publisher's website. It cost $18 more, but I got the DVD.