About

Cari saluti!

Mi chiamo Laura “Lucrezia” Martell.

I would like to take this opportunity to introduce myself and give you a sense of the path that has constituted my Italian language-learning journey thus far.

As a child I was fascinated by the Italian part of my heritage. I never met my paternal grandfather, who was the first of his family born in the United States after his mother brought his older siblings to Minnesota from southern Italy to join my great-grandfather. Like so many new Americans, my great grandparents discouraged their children from speaking their mother tongue. All familial contact with Italian language and culture had been severed a generation before I arrived apart from a much modified recipe for red sauce and meatballs and my father’s nostalgia for a homeland that had never been his.

I had the privilege of being taken on several family vacations to Italy as a child, but the opportunity to formalize my language studies did not present itself until high school when I attended the Concordia Language Villages’ Italian Language Village: Lago del Bosco for the first time; I have never left. It is over twenty years now, and I have enjoyed the position of Assistant Dean for nearly ten of those years. At Lago del Bosco I have honed my skills as a language teacher in an immersion environment that prioritizes community, playfulness and the natural world.

While spending my summers intentionally losing myself in the forest to teach Italian and mentoring budding Italian teachers, I received a B.A. in Italian Studies at The University of Minnesota in 2009 during which time I had the opportunity spend an academic year in Rome and take a number of courses at The University of Rome, “La Sapienza”. I earned an M.A. Georgetown University, studying for a semester at the University of Turin to aid in my research into Italian actresses in the Commedia dell’Arte and Opera Bufa.

It took three additional years of doctoral studies and student teaching at Duke University before I realized that academia was not the right path for me. Like Dante in a selva oscura (dark wood), my straightforward path had been lost. So, I removed myself from the halls of academia to the healing surroundings of the Minnesota North Woods where I continue to tread a path of sharing Italian language and culture. I invite you to let your path converge with mine for a while.