Foundation Year - Humanities
The Foundation Year Humanities invites students to explore literature, history, art, and philosophy, developing the critical tools to interpret the complexity of the contemporary world through the lens of Italian and European culture.
From your very first words in Italian, you’ll embark on a journey that goes beyond language, discovering a culture, connecting with a community, and opening doors to new academic and professional horizons.
Language laboratories, through a gradual learning process, aim to enable students to interact naturally in Italian, express their needs and opinions, understand spoken and written texts in Italian, and produce simple to moderately complex written texts. Absolute beginners will start with a pre-A1 laboratory and then learn Italian from level A1 to level B1. Students who already have an introductory knowledge of the Italian language will instead start with laboratories of level A2 and improve their language skills up until level B2, including a laboratory of academic Italian.
Two thematic courses, Italian Grammar and Language Varieties and Italian Culture through Literary Texts, aim to consolidate students’ linguistic knowledge, strengthen their ability to think critically about the foundations of grammar and language registers, and familiarize them with Italian culture through the reading, analysis, and contextualization of texts from the literary tradition.
This Foundation Year offers a general, interdisciplinary introduction to the knowledge of the humanities, with a particular focus on Italian and European history and culture, through four teaching units: Introduction to Literature, European History, Art History, and Philosophy.
By exploring the history of thought, culture, and artistic and expressive forms relating to the human condition, students are enabled to critically examine their own present and to orient themselves within the complexity of contemporary debates.
The courses aim not only to provide students with a comprehensive education in terms of theory and subject matter, but also to develop their ability to understand, interpret and critically analyze the contents. For this reason, lectures are accompanied by regular classroom discussions and, where possible, involve the sharing of textual and audiovisual material, as well as the optional preparation of papers by students and their in-depth analysis by teachers.
These workshops are designed to give students a real headstart when it comes to university admission tests. Each student will select three workshops from a varied list, covering the key areas assessed in both Italian and English-taught degree admission tests, so they can step into their admission tests feeling confident and prepared.
