Language Profiles

Antonino Bondì’s teaching career stemmed from an unlikely place: a goal of practicing pharmacy in Italy, where he’d always hoped to live. Nowadays, Bondì teaches Italian 1 and 2, Italian honors 3 and 4, and AP Italian at Rolling Meadows High School and is a diving coach at Prospect High School, both in suburban Chicago. For the past year, he’s also served as president of the Midwest Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of Italian (AATI), an organization open to past, current and future teachers from the private or public sector, as well as college students who are studying …

  Defining her identity and pinpointing where she feels most at home — in Italy or the United States — has never been easy for Raffaella Spilotro, the director of the children’s summer camp at Casa Italia in Stone Park. That’s because, for the first nine years of her life, Spilotro grew up in Capurso, a small town in the province of Bari, Puglia, with her parents speaking only Italian. Her mother and father came with their families to America in the 1960s, met and married here, and decided to move back to Italy when she was 2 months hold. …

Italian language teacher Lauren Krause loves to bring food and cultural items into the classroom to make the learning experience more vivid for her students. “Most recently, students tried 100% extra virgin authentic olive oil, which many had never tried in their lives,” says Krause, a 7th and 8th grade Italian teacher at Indian Trail Junior High School in Addison, Illinois. “It was so fun seeing their reactions.” Krause has taught for 13 years at Indian Trail, where she currently teaches six sections of Italian to around 100 students each day. Her Italian level 1 course takes place over two …

Now in his 7th year as a high school Italian-language teacher, Cody Mueller can’t imagine a career better suited for him. At one point, however, he came close to giving up on his dream. “It was a bumpy road there for a while,” the 30-year-old says. “Right out of college, I felt very enthusiastic about everything. I was working part-time but I had a hard time nailing down a full-time position, and I got a little bit exhausted. I started to lose faith in being able to find that stability and I even left teaching for two years.” A lifelong …

Italian teacher Francesca Tinnirello Suraci says the key to being an effective educator is to let your passion show. “You have to show how passionate you are about something, through your energy and your love for the subject,” Suraci says. “Those are the teachers that made the most impact on me.” Her Italian high school teacher, Dorina Spiering, was a great inspiration, says Suraci, a board member for the Midwest Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of Italian. “She was such a passionate, bubbly person. I had never seen such a passion in a person,” she says, adding the …

If not for a pair of fateful coincidences, Mariangela Pezzella-Bonasera might be working in the corporate world rather than pursuing a flourishing career teaching Italian 1, 2, 3 and AP at Wheeling High School. During her undergraduate years at Dominican University, she was studying international business and Italian when she took part in a marketing internship at the Sorrento Lingue (a language institute) in Italy. She finished her project ahead of schedule and got an assignment she wasn’t expecting — to teach English to Italian teens. “I actually fell in love with it and had a great time,” she says. “I …

On the first day of class, high school teacher Roberta Guttilla asks her new students why they want to learn Italian, and loves to hear their answers. “They tell me all these different stories,” Guttilla says. “They fell in love with the culture, they visited Italy once, they want to major in Italian in college. Or they say, ‘My great grandparents were Italian and never passed on the language to us.’” Guttilla is an Italian instructor at York Community High School in Elmhurst, where this year she’s teaching five classes of different levels. She is also certified to teach Spanish …

After nearly three decades of teaching religion, Roberto Costa has a simple replay whenever people mention retirement. “I say, ‘What are you talking about?’” reports the 57-year-old Costa, who has master’s degrees in divinity and theology. “I am very passionate about what I do, and I want to continue doing it.” Born in Turate, in Italy’s Lombardy region, Costa moved to Chicago at age 23 to study at Catholic Theological Union. After graduation, he ended up staying permanently in the Windy City, where he met his wife, Sandra Hou, who was born in Burma (now Myanmar) and grew up in …

It only seems like Casa Italia’s popular language and cuisine instructor, Giovanna “Jackie” Dimetros, is leading a double life. Some people know her as Giovanna and others as Jackie, she has inexplicably English and Greek surnames, and people aren’t certain whether she’s a cooking or Italian teacher or both. But she is in fact one delightful Italian-born Chicagoan who integrates all these identities. The story begins during World War II. An American Army officer, Major Jack Spears, a Chicago native stationed in Tuscany, fell in love with his future wife Miranda in the town of Livorno. After they married, they …

When Gianluca Butticè moved from his native Sicily to the U.S., he faced the challenges of learning English and American culture. Surmounting that learning curve inspired him to make the journey easier for others. So after spending the past several years teaching Italian, he is branching out into offering tours of Italy that encompass language and culture in a mutually enhancing way. “I know the doors that are opened when you learn a new language,” he says, explaining that traveling, learning the culture of a country and learning the language can all reinforce each other. Butticè, 41, believes everything he …