What do you do if you’re a busy Italophile living in Charlottesville, VA and your schedule keeps you from visiting Italy as often as you’d like? You make your way to the Main Street Market to visit Verity Blue, an Italian boutique that serves a mean cappuccino and a downright delicious gelato.
But what if you want more than an immediate Italian fix for your stomach? What if your ears long to hear the music of the Italian language, your eyes are desperate for the beauty of the boot-shaped peninsula, your tongue wants to gyrate across a long Italian “rrrr,” and your hands wish they knew how to create the beautiful, simple food for which Italy is so well known?
Then you’ll need to pay a visit to Ecco Italy, an innovative and Italo-centric learning center located just above Verity Blue. Founded by Christina Ball, a former academic with a lot of entrepreneurial spirit, Ecco Italy offers Italian language courses (as well as French and Spanish!) for beginning and intermediate learners, as well as more specialized courses such as “Book Club Italiano,” “Cinema Chat,” and “Ecco Opera.”
Best of all, this is not your conventional school room language course. The friendly atmosphere of Ecco Italy invites students to hang around, to get to know their teachers and their fellow students, and to partake of a wide variety of cultural events–from lectures to cooking classes to wine tastings.
And, if you do find that you’re headed to Italy, Christina and her team at Ecco Italy can advise you (or even escort you!). Their travel services include a sister language school in Todi, an apartment for rent in Pisa, and a brilliantly conceived crash course in Italian language and culture that includes history lessons, basic language practice, cultural orientation, wine tastings, and travel advice.
A few years ago, we at the eCool Compound had the good fortune to meet Christina Ball, owner and director of Ecco Italy. We were impressed and charmed, and, thus, we were thrilled when she recently agreed to an interview with eCool. We hope you enjoy reading about Christina and Ecco Italy. We only wish we lived a bit closer so that we could be part of the “Little Italy” she’s created in Charlottesville.
Ecco Italy is a great idea! What compelled your to start this company and/or how did you come up with the idea for Ecco Italy?
I always knew I was too creative, too enthusiastic for academia. Still, it wasn’t until 2004, 6 years after earning my doctorate in Italian Literature from Yale, that all of the pieces fell into place for Ecco Italy in Charlottesville, Virginia. I had always dreamed of running my own school, a place without grades, a classroom that opened out onto the marketplace and the world, a place where conversation would be more important than written tests, where students of all ages would be encouraged to pursue their dream of “becoming Italian” in a supportive and beautiful environment.
Charlottesville is not only the home of Thomas Jefferson - a huge Europhile - and his University of Virginia, but it’s also a place with a sophisticated and varied cultural scene, a constant stream of interesting visitors and a strong local food and wine presence. Especially in recent years, many people have fled bigger cities and stressful jobs to seek a higher quality of life in Charlottesville. Somehow, it seems that when people pause for a moment in life to focus on themselves and their long-neglected dreams, Italian makes a dramatic appearance.
In addition to teaching undergrads, I taught a popular continuing ed night course at UVA called “All Aboard Italy” a sort of traveler’s Italian class. It was always full and at the end of the eight weeks the students, ranging in age from 22-82, would always beg me to teach them more Italian, to take them to Italy with me. After the third term of “All Aboard” in 2003, I was sure that there was a market for Ecco Italy here in Virginia, and when I was offered a beautiful space above an Italian café and farm table store downtown, there was no saying no.
My first class back in the fall of 2004, conversational Italian for beginners, had 5 wonderful students – including a young poet, an engineer who designed parts for Ferrari cars and a retired opera singer. Over the next few years, my vision took hold and I gradually added more language and culture classes – Cinema Chat (conversation through Italian film), Buon Viaggio: Italian for Travelers and Dreamers, a Book Club Italiano, Ecco Cibo regional Italian cooking and culture classes. I also added travel and business consulting and training to the mix.
By 2006 I had 6 Italian courses on the curriculum and about 200 students and, since the model was so popular, I added a Spanish division (Spain on Main) and French division in 2007. (note: Soon the center’s name will be changed to SPEAK Language and Culture Center – just for clarity’s sake! Ecco Italy will refer only to the Italian component)
Would you describe the kinds of opportunities offered by Ecco Italy?
Ecco Italy (if we consider the Italian part only – not the entire center with Spanish and French) is an oasis for the Italophile or for anyone desiring to appreciate life a bit more through language and culture. We offer a range of classes for everyone from the traveler needing to learn the basics (greetings, pronunciation, ordering, etc.) to nearly fluent speakers looking to practice what they know through stimulating discussion topics and activities.
Now that we have a “sister school” in Italy – La Lingua, La Vita in Todi (Umbria), we also offer the chance to be fully immersed in the language and culture of Italy through our Two Weeks in Todi course held in Todi (and Roma!) each September.
We also love to foster community and education through our cultural events such as wine tastings, events in conjunction with local book and film festivals and guest speakers such as our recent lecture on Rossini in Paris by an opera expert.
How is learning at Ecco Italy different from taking the normal evening language course?
First of all, the location and the living room/dining room décor of the colorful classroom (farm table, stylish couches, a big flat screen tv) are a refreshing change from the fluorescent lights and monochrome furnishings of the typical university classroom. There is often music playing when students arrive, and they may be carrying a cappuccino and a pastry as they take their seats around the farm table.
Lessons in our classroom are highly interactive and filled with partner activities, games, film clips and even occasional food (cheeses, gelato) and wine tastings. Instructors often take the students on “field trips” to the bakery or the cheese shop of the coffee bar so that students get the chance to use their language skills in a setting that’s as real as possible. I often get behind the bar and take orders for gelati and espressi from my students in italiano (luckily, the real baristi do the making and the serving!). I took my recent Buon Viaggio class to our swank new Italian wine bar in Charlottesville, enoteca, for a lesson on Italian regional wines and wine tasting. Anything to keep it fresh, to get people moving and speaking and to bring us as close as possible to the real thing – being in Italia.
Beyond just learning the language, what do you hope that clients at Ecco Italy will take home with them?
One of the most rewarding comments I’ve received from a student is that classes at Ecco Italy make them believe that change and seemingly unrealizable dreams (i.e. someday speaking Italian and traveling to Italy) are in fact, possible. I often overhear students saying that Ecco Italy is their “social life”, that it is the highpoint of their week or day, that it has turned on a light inside of them that they never want to extinguish. That’s pretty incredible to hear and is the fuel that keeps me going when, as multiple hat-wearing owner/director/manager/instructor, I run out of steam!
How would you describe the Ecco Italy community?
It’s a very diverse (all ages, professions, linguistic skill levels) and supportive community that’s luckily growing by the week. A person might sign up for a beginner’s class for an upcoming trip, but before they know it they’re attending cooking classes, French events and coming to Todi with me and their new friends!
I’ve had everyone from stay-at-home parents to massage therapists, graduate students and bestselling writers in my classes, and this variety serves to create a kind of “family-style” approach to education. Instead of competing, students support each other and this is vital since, for adults, foreign language learning can often bring to the surface deep insecurities and fears.
What is your most popular course offering?
It really changes! Since my core group that’s been with me from the beginning is still with me, our intermediate morning classes are always full. But I’d say Buon Viaggio and anything involving food and wine are also quite popular for those not pursuing a long-term dream of fluency.
Ecco Cibo must be a real bonus for the participants in the cooking class—what would you say is the primary difference between cooking in Italy and cooking in America?
Italy still eats and drinks regionally – something we are just learning to do here in the U.S. these days. Here in the States we favor new flavors and cuisines (for the most part) and love being able to get Maine lobster in Chicago, San Francisco sourdough in South Carolina, strawberries in December.
When I am in Umbria with my group in September, we drink Sagrantino and Orvieto wines, eat porcini-chick pea soup and thick umbricelli pasta coated in black truffle paste. The students return to Virginia understanding that there is no such thing as “Italian cuisine”, but instead there is Umbrian cuisine, Tuscan cuisine, Roman cuisine etc. Like the Italians themselves, Italian food has deep local roots and we can only fully appreciate this truth by eating our way around its 20 delightfully distinct regions – one of my personal life goals!
Italy is one of the top travel destinations for Americans. Why do you think Americans are so attracted to Italy?
It seems to me that the Italians, whether it’s true or not (I’m married to one!), have a lifestyle that most Americans crave and romanticize. In the eyes of most Americans, Italians still maintain many of the values that many feel are slipping away from us in the U.S. – long lunches and even longer vacations, the chance to be more than your profession, a sense of being grounded by both geography and family, a sense of style and elegance, the overarching importance of beauty (human, natural, artistic, culinary) and, of course, the melodic language.
What advice do you offer your clients as they prepare for trips to Italy?
I encourage them from the start to explore and learn about the incredible geographic, cultural, culinary diversity of Italy. I also encourage them to look closely at themselves and their own likes, dislikes and dreams. If someone loves nature, beaches and small towns, they will certainly be happier in Maremma or Puglia than Florence or Milan.
Often people have a very limited view of Italy at first, and they are constantly surprised by the things they learn in class – that there are cities called Parma and Reggio where “Parmigiano-Reggiano” is made, that unemployment is high, or that big families are no longer the norm in Italy.
Would you share with us your favorite place in Italy and tell us why it’s so special to you?
This is a hard one! I suppose part of the reason why so many of travelers start planning their next trip to Italy as soon as they get home is because each new place we discover becomes a special favorite place. My own favorite places shift over time and with my own changing life. I am quickly falling in love with the tranquil hilltown of Todi and the surrounding Umbrian countryside, but I am also a new resident of Pisa (my husband and I bought an apartment in a medieval Casa Torre/Tower House last year).
As I spend more time in Pisa’s relatively unexplored (by tourists) historic center, shopping at the market just outside my door, sipping wine in Piazza Vettovaglie packed with Pisans, taking a scooter-ride to nearby beaches – it is quickly becoming my new favorite place, my new home.
But there’s one place in Italy that has been my eternal favorite ever since my first visit to Italy in 1985: Roma. Wandering the streets and river banks of Rome’s Trastevere and Ghetto neighborhoods in the late summer is an experience I constantly crave when I’m home in Virginia. It’s both blissfully peaceful and energizingly urban at the same time. Everything radiates warmth and beauty. Only in Rome have the otherwise conflicting powers of chaos and mystery declared an eternal truce.
