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 raised little Jackie and her sister in Tuscany for a few years, then began a pattern of a spending a year in Italy, a year in Chicago, and so on.

Schoolchildren in Italy couldn’t pronounce “Jackie,” however, which left her feeling mortified.

“So my mom said, “In Italy, we’ll call you Giovanna, and in the United States we’ll call you Jackie,” she recalls.

Her Greek surname comes from her late husband, Fredric. His family owned a restaurant on Chicago’s Gold Coast, Andre’s. That, combined with the fact that her uncle in Italy owned a seaside restaurant in the Italian Riviera town of Castiglioncello, led to her love of cooking.

After raising her children, Jonandre and Alexandra, she began teaching Italian and cooking informally at restaurants on their slow nights. She would design each session’s lesson and menu to focus on a particular region of Italy. She also took a few tours to Italy, bringing the groups to her relatives’ vineyards and olive groves in Italy and taking day trips to sightsee.

She began teaching the same sort of Italian conversation-plus-cooking-lesson, focusing on one region at a time, at Casa Italia. About eight years ago, that led to teaching regular Italian language classes at Casa. Today, she teaches about three days a week there, gives private lessons, performs occasional translations for the Italian Trade Commission and volunteers for the Coalition for Limited English Speaking Elderly (www.clese.org), translating and assisting nurses to help secure medical services for the elderly.

“I love what I do,” Dimetros says. “I love teaching, and I even get a little sad when my classes end. Many students sign up again, which makes me really happy. They become friends, so it becomes a nice social ongoing friendship.”

Some of her students described the experience of being in her class.

“As a teacher, Giovanna uses her artistic talents to create ways to introduce and to review a skill, in order to keep the interest of the class, e.g., a team game where winning involves using correct verb tenses, or a homework assignment that includes writing a description of a photograph,” said Brenda Esposito.

Kathleen Cappetta, who has gone to Dimetros’ language classes for about four years and attends many of her cooking classes, described Dimetros as a “wonderful teacher.”

“We do a lot of laughing in class and no matter how worn out I am walking into the class (dopo lavoro), I walk out with a lighter step and a smile on my face,” Cappetta said.

Finally, Randy Albers, a Columbia College professor who has been teaching for four decades, called Dimetros’ classes “exemplary and a joy.”

“She is, quite simply, an excellent teacher, someone who has a unique ability to make serious learning accessible and downright fun. She is remarkably able to engage and draw out the best work from a very diverse group of people,” he said.  “Giovanna Dimetros is one of the finest teachers I’ve ever seen, and I feel very fortunate to have found my way into her class.”

Far from leading a double life, Dimetros has achieved something singular — bringing knowledge and joy to her students, all with a light touch.

To sign up for one of Dimestros classes, call 708-345-5933, ext. 2.

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 has done in the past 15 years, including earning a bachelor’s degree in hospitality and industrial/organizational psychology from DePaul University, teaching Italian at Language Loop and Berlitz, and interpreting for business clients — is evolving into the business he founded last year, Madrelingua Italiana Inc. (Madrelingua means “mother tongue.”)

It will combine language learning and travel, as well as introduce travelers to the culture of Italy, which Butticè says has subtle but important differences from U.S. culture.

“I always had it in mind to combine the language learning with my hospitality studies and experience,” says Butticè. “I really put some effort into this, and this is really giving me joy.”

He’s offering his first trip, an eight-day tour of Sicily, in September, and plans to include language learning and information about Italian and Sicilian culture in addition to the travel. As the group circles from Palermo to Erice, Segesta, Agrigento, Noto, Siracusa and Taormina, he has arranged for experts to provide architectural commentary, cooking classes and winery tours.

It’s part of Butticè’s mission to get tourists to Italy beyond the usual tourism sites, like Rome and Venice, to discover the various regions of Italy in an in-depth fashion. He’s starting from what he knows, as he grew up in Favara, a Sicilian town outside of Agrigento.

He learned the basics of English in school there, in the Italian equivalent of middle school and high school. Not until arriving in North America in 2009 and spending time in Canada and the U.S., however, did he really begin learning the finer points of the language. After completing his studies at Truman College and DePaul and getting his degree in 2012, he began working as an Italian instructor for adult students and a translator.

His students have included people preparing to go to Italy on a student exchange mission, people preparing to live or work in Italy and at least one student who was getting ready to attend medical school in Milan.

As his views on the interconnection of language learning, travel and culture evolved, Butticè decided to add four terms below the name of his company: learn the language, travel, discover and grow.

“This is what I am all about,” he explains. “I try to convey cultural insight besides the language itself, and the travel adds to that so people discover and grow.”

For details, visit madrelinguaitaliana.com.

Growing up in an Italian-American family, Kathryn Occhipinti experienced the Italian food, the emphasis on togetherness and the practicing of the Catholic faith. But she felt one piece of her heritage was missing: the language.

Her grandparents and parents would converse in Italian, making it even more of a mysterious to her. After completing her medical training, she spent years studying the language, writing books and teaching classes in conversational Italian. She gears her efforts toward adult learners with a desire to travel to Italy.

“Today, people are trying to understand where they came from, and the language was really key to me in understanding my family,” she says.

Her journey to that realization took years, starting in her childhood in Long Island, N.Y. Her family would often visit her grandparents in their Italian enclave in Brooklyn, and she would hear people in the neighborhood speaking the language. They also celebrated Italian street fairs.

“It was very exotic to me,” Occhipinti recalls. “It was a fun place for me as a child, and I loved going there.”

Years went by as she attended medical school in Boston and Manhattan, took a fellowship in California, landed her first job in radiology in Florida, and then got married and had a daughter.

When her little girl was 2, Occhipinti and her then-husband decided to move to Peoria to raise her as well as a son who was born a couple of years later. She had studied Italian throughout high school, but after joining the Italian American Society of Peoria, she started studying the language in earnest, mainly on her own through books. A teacher friend recruited her to teach Italian about 10 years ago, and she says she really learned the language by teaching it.

“I had been to Italy, but I didn’t know enough Italian to get around very well,” she said. “So I started gearing the classes to adults, who may want to visit their relatives in Italy.”

She wanted to teach people how to take planes, trains and taxis to get around in Italy, as well as navigate menus in different regions.

Unable to find books to impart what she wanted to teach, Occhipinti wrote her own, and had each vetted and approved by Italian teachers from whom she was taking lessons. They were native speakers.

She organized each chapter with dialogue, vocabulary and important phrases. She also included cultural notes, such as that restaurants in Italy include gratuities on the check.

“I tried to make the books chatty and fun,” she explains.

On Sundays, she taught the language to Italian American Society of Peoria members, and they practiced over coffee and cake.

“People would hear about it and call me and say, ‘I want to go to Italy next year to meet relatives, and I’d like to learn some Italian,’” she said. “So I learned I wasn’t the only one who grew up Italian but felt the language was missing.”

She balanced the learning, teaching and writing with her work in radiology, often writing part of a chapter during a night she was on call for her job.

“For me it’s a good balance, because I have two sides — I love science and medicine, but I also am creative, and this keeps up my creative side,” Occhipinti reflects.

After her daughter, now 20, graduated from high school in Peoria, she moved to Hinsdale and enrolled her son in high school there. She works out of Hinsdale Hospital for a radiology group.

She also leads an Italian-language meet-up group out of the Hinsdale library every third Monday evening. The beginners’ group meets from 7 to 8 p.m. and the intermediate group from 8 to 9 p.m.

Occhipinti also offers free Italian language learning, as well as her book, “Conversational Italian for Travelers,” and other materials at www.LearnTravelItalian.com.

An Italian teacher and administrator in northwest suburban High School District 214, Angela Briguglio Hawkins was known as “the American” when she was growing up in Sicily.

That’s because she was born in Oak Park, but her parents decided to move the family back to their native Sicily when Briguglio Hawkins was two-and-a-half years old. They missed their relatives.

“I did all my schooling in Italy, up until the equivalent of the first year in high school,” she says. “But then my dad was worried about the lack of economic opportunity in Europe, so my parents moved back to give me a better future.”

She was 15 when they returned in 1998, but she had picked up not only Italian, but German and French while living in Europe.

That gave her an excellent background to start teaching Italian at District 214 high schools in 2006, after earning a bachelor’s degree in secondary education from Northeastern Illinois University. About five years ago, she also earned a master’s degree in educational administration and a Type 75 (administrative) certification from Concordia University.

To boost her educational level even further, she is working on a second master’s degree in curriculum and instruction with a focus on English Language Learners.

All that education paid off last July, when District 214 promoted her to division head of Social Science, World Languages and English Language Learners. In that position, she hires personnel, observes teachers, gives summative evaluations and performs management functions.

She is one of five division heads at Wheeling High School, and there are similar division heads at the other five District 214 high schools.

She describes the job as being the “vision head” of the department, working with teachers on professional development, and innovating and being creative in the classroom.

“What I like about administration is that I’m helping teachers support their students — you can’t do that without somebody else helping you,’ she says.

She’s also thankful she still gets to conduct one class in AP Italian, because she loves teaching.

“It’s so nice being able to observe other teachers,” she comments. “You get ideas for your own teaching. We have a great department with amazing teachers that care about their students.”

She has experience with being an English Language Learner herself. When her family returned from Italy to Chicago when she was 15, she was placed in the freshman class at Ridgewood High School in Norridge, even though her age and schooling would have placed her as a sophomore, because she didn’t speak English.

She had a passion for learning it, though, and says she picked it up within six months. She also took Italian classes taught by Dolores Pigoni Miller, who became a mentor.

“It was nice that someone understood me,” Briguglio Hawkins explains.

She also picked up a better command of Italian language and grammar, paving the way for her eventual teaching career.

Naturally, she’s a big proponent of studying foreign languages.

“Studies have shown it helps students with standardized testing, because there are words you might not commonly use in English that are used in foreign languages.”

Students who study a language also learn about the culture, which she feels is helpful in teaching them about the larger world.

Briguglio Hawkins is married to a Chicago Police sergeant, and they have a five-year-old, a three-year-old and a three-month-old baby. She has taken her husband back to Italy to see her native land, and has also taken students on trips there when she had her own classroom.

“Learning a language is something that goes with you,” she says. “You have it for a lifetime.”

Spending every summer of his childhood in Sicily convinced Antonino Bondi that he wanted a career somehow related to Italy. He never pictured himself as a teacher in those days, but he has realized his dream in a classroom.

Bondi, 31, the son of parents who immigrated from Sicily to Chicago in the 1970s, teaches Italian 2, 3 and 4 in northwest suburban Township High School District 214. He starts his day teaching at Rolling Meadows High School, and then travels to Prospect High School in Mount Prospect to teach in the afternoons.

For someone who spoke the Sicilian dialect as his first language until he went to kindergarten, Bondi has come full circle.

“The joke in my family is that, when I was a little kid, I came home from that first day of school and said, ‘everyone talks differently,’ Bondi recalls. “My parents laughed and said I was the one who talked differently, but that I would learn.”

While he learned English in school, he was also learning some finer points of Italian at Casa Italia’s Italian language classes, starting in about second grade. During the summers, his parents, who were from the town of Altavilla Milicia, near Palermo, would send Antonino and his sister to stay with their aunts in Sicily. That also strengthened their command of Italian.

As a child starting out with Sicilian, he says he picked up both English and Italian grammar as the years went along. After his fifth grade year, however, the family moved from the Belmont and Narragansett neighborhood in Chicago to the suburb of Prospect Heights. His high school was Hersey High School in Arlington Heights, and as a freshman, he was disappointed they didn’t offer Italian.

“I started a petition drive to see if students wanted to take Italian,” Bondi says. “It got a lot of signatures, so we started an Italian club my sophomore year.”

He had good timing. The middle schools in the area were offering Italian, and consequently High School District 214, which includes Hersey, started an Italian program. Bondi was able to take Italian 1 during his senior year of high school.

“I knew all the vocabulary, but because class was on a daily basis, it really strengthened my knowledge of the language,” he says.

Ever since childhood, Bondi had felt his identity was as Italian as it was American, and he nurtured a dream of having a lifelong connection to Italy. He originally planned to become a pharmacist and work at a hospital in Sicily where his aunt was an administrator. A job as an Osco pharmacy technician the summer between high school and college was his first real exposure to working in a pharmacy, and he found it wasn’t for him. Then a friend planted a seed in his mind by suggesting he could teach Italian.

He attended Loyola University of Chicago, spending a year at its John Felice Rome Center campus in Italy and graduating with a double degree in Italian and secondary education.

That led to a job teaching Italian at Morton East High School for two years, and then the job at District 214, where he has worked for seven years.

He participates in Prospect High School’s student exchange program, which pairs about 20 students with students at a Verona, Italy high school. The American students’ families host the Italians for a week, and then the Italians reciprocate by hosting the Americans in Verona.

He didn’t go to Italy on the last exchange, however, because his wife Rita was about to give birth to their firstborn, Domenico Matteo, who is now eight months old.

As a teacher, students often come to Bondi saying they want to take Italian but someone else — often a family member — wants them to study a different language.

“I tell them, ‘choose a language you want to take, not a language somebody else wants you to take. If you take a language you’re not interested in, there won’t be that learning, that retention, because you don’t have a passion for it.’”

Asked why he continues teaching, he responds, “Students come with different interests, and it’s my job to connect their interests with the language and the culture. I love to see their progression. In the beginning, it’s tough for them, but at the end of four years, they’re almost surprised at how well they do.”

“It was a really transformative experience,” Curley, an Italian teacher at East Leyden High School, says of the month-long visit. They met relatives, took road trips around southern Italy, returned to Basilicata and then went north to Rome, Florence, Pisa and Venice.

When they returned to the Chicago area, Curley wanted to take Italian when she enrolled at Carmel High School in Mundelein. A nun put her in French, but she was dismayed to later find out she could have taken Italian on the boys’ side of Carmel, which at that time had separate schools for boys and girls.

After four years of high school French, she took both French and Italian in college and graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago with a degree in the teaching of French.

“It was kind of funny, because my professor said, ‘rAe you going to look for a job teaching French?’ And I said, ‘No, I’m going to Italy,’” Curley recalls.

She lived in France for a year and Italy for seven years, spending most of her 20s there teaching English and working as a travel agent.

Returning to the United States in the 1990s, she earned a master’s degree in French, and in 1998, began searching for a job teaching either French or Italian. Leyden Township High School District 212 didn’t need a French teacher, but they did hire her as the Italian teacher for East Leyden High School.

“I’m very grateful and happy to be the Italian teacher at East Leyden for all these years,” Curley says.

She teaches Italian 1, 2, 3, 4, advanced placement and 5 (independent study).

None of the elementary school districts that send students to East Leyden offer Italian in middle school, so only students who already speak Italian at home can progress into level 5.

However, many students in East Leyden’s area — which includes Schiller Park, Rosemont, River Grove and Franklin Park — know some Italian from their families, she says.

The district also contains West Leyden High School in Northlake, and it offers French, Italian and Spanish in its Modern Languages department. Language teachers work together to promote them, and plan culture nights to enable students to show off the art and food from their languages.

“Learning languages helps students in other subjects too,” Curley explains. “It helps you become more intelligent overall.”

She returns to Italy occasionally, has led students on five trips to Italy, and keeps up with Italian friends. East Leyden has an exchange program with a school in Italy that sent students here last summer. A group of Leyden students will travel to Italy next summer.

And she continues to encourage students to enroll in Italian.

“It’s great to know a language from a culture that has given so many artistic contributions to the world,” she says. “Everyone should know at least two languages, and why not Italian? It’s so beautiful.”

Prior to arriving at Highland Park High School two years ago, Maria Barbanente had already blazed a trail where life’s adventures had added depth to her linguistic skills. The daughter of native Italians from the Puglia region, Barbanente had a master’s degree in education, and a certification in Spanish, by the time she arrived in Madrid, Spain to teach English for two years.

It was hardly her first time in Europe. “Learning the Italian language and having been fortunate enough to travel to Italy every summer as a child, I was able to further explore the Italian culture and build relationships with family members and friends,” recalls Barbanente, a Chicago native. She also studied in Rome for a semester as a college junior.

And in her fist year of teaching full-time at Trinity High School in River Forest, “I took 18 girls on an educational tour of Italy,” she says. “It was the first time many of them had ever left the country and was truly an eye-opening experience for them. Several students went on in college to study in Italy.”

It’s safe to say that 10 years after that 2006 trip, Barbanente continues to have the same positive influence on her charges—and will once again make a difference once school’s back in session. She expects to teach about 120 students in a variety of courses including Italian 1, Italian 2, Italian 3-4 combined, and Spanish 2.

The Italian program at Highland Park High School approaches language learning from a number of angles. For starters, an Italian Club gives students a chance to broaden their horizons—both within school and across an ocean.

“Joining the Italian club is a great way for students indulge in more Italian culture outside of class—and connect with other students outside of their own Italian class,” Barbanente says. “We play Italian games such as tombola or Italian card games, we eat Italian food and listen to Italian music.”

HPHS also has an Italian Honor Society induction ceremony near the end of the school year where high-achieving students are recognized and their parents invited.

Barbanente looks forward to watching, over time, groups of new Italian students work four years to become skilled speakers and readers. It’s her mission to not just teach the language, but also engender a passion befitting of Italian culture and history.

“My goal is to build and strengthen the program over time,” she says. “My level 1 enrollment this past year consisted of predominantly freshman, and that points to great potential for program longevity.”

Barbanente adds that she’s excited “that most of my Italian 2 students will soon be Italian 3 students—and I hope that they will stay the course through level 4. I’m also looking forward to teaching the younger siblings of many of my current or former students.”

Coming back this fall, she’ll have a full had of steam and another adventure under her belt. This summer she studied in Siena, Italy under Prof. Suzanne Branciforte, author of the Italian textbook “Parliamo Italiano!“

Is it a challenging profession to teach Italian to teens? Challenging, yes—but hardly just a profession.

“I never viewed teaching Italian as simply a job,” Barbanente stresses. “As an Italian teacher I feel I’m acting as an ambassador for the country of my heritage, its culture and its endless treasures to be discovered.

A teacher of Spanish as well, Campsciano Ungaro is known to go to creative lengths to instill fervor for the language in her students. That could range from an immersion day for her upper-level pupils at DePaul University, to a field trip to Fra Noi’s headquarters to discuss the important role Italian Americans have played in our nation’s history. “While learning about regional Italian cooking, my Italian 2 students visit Canta Napoli Restaurant in Mount Prospect to learn about and enjoy traditional, Italian brick oven pizza,” she adds.

So what do you do for a second course? We have a thriving Italian Club at both East and West, and one of our Italian Club field trips was to an authentic gelateria in Chicago, Caffe Gelato,” she says. That place, she adds, “always reminds me of being in Sicily at the gelateria near my nonna’s house.”

Campsciano Ungaro’s enthusiasm for languages took hold while she attended DePaul. “My undergraduate professors Clara Orban and Gary Cestaro instilled in me the passion to pursue the study and teaching of the Italian language, literature and culture,” she says. Today, she teaches approximately 150 students; at Maine East, she’s solely responsible for the program and at Maine West Campsciano Ungaro is part of two-teacher team. Her experience is extensive, as she’s also taught at Addison Trail High School, Prospect High School, the University of Chicago as a graduate student and Loyola University Chicago as an adjunct faculty member.

She’s also made the news, when Main East hosted teachers and visitors from Pisa. Trib Local covered that event in 2010, and the enthusiasm students reflected in that piece was palpable, a sure sign that Campsciano Ungaro knows how to keep her charges on their toes.

“The challenging part of my job is keeping things new and exciting for the students,” says Campsciano Ungaro. “As a teacher, you have to find strategies that are effective yet engaging. I’m a lifelong learner, so while this is challenging at times, it is also something that I very much enjoy.”

To that end, the teacher gets a little help from her students: “I’m always impressed with the leadership and great ideas my students bring to the table to share their passion with others for the Italian language and culture.”

“My parents were both born in Italy in a small town, Castel San Vincenzo in the region of Molise,” says Modica, whose maiden name is Marzullo. “My mother was 27 when she moved here and didn’t speak English; I learned Italian before English. I’ve always spoken Italian and was raised in the Italian culture. It’s an integral part of who I am: I’ve always been in love with the language and have a duty to share this love with others.”

That duty keeps Modica busy, as she leads about 120 Main South students in Italian 1, 3, 4, and 4 Accelerated, the equivalent of an honors class. “My teaching philosophy is that the students’ needs come first,” she says. “Each day brings some new challenge. You have to anticipate what students need and make them believe they can accomplish what you know they can accomplish.” To do this, Modica keeps her curriculum relevant to the world outside; “I keep updated with music, TV, fashion and news from Italy. I still travel there, so I bring this new information to my students, and I read online newspapers to keep up with economic and political happenings.”

Modica’s travel happens personally and professionally. Most of her parents’ immediate family members still reside in Italy, so her trips there have been frequent. But a few years ago, she joined Main South colleague Stella Weber (profiled in Fra Noi’s April 2013 issue) on an Italy trip that included students. On that sojourn, Modica saw her ancestral home through a new lens of wonder and curiosity.

“That trip changed me forever,” she says. “Being with a group of students experiencing Italy for the first time is life changing. I loved seeing the looks on their faces when they spotted la Fontana di Trevi for the first time, or held an entire conversation with a ‘real Italian.’ It’s simply priceless, and that’s why I do what I do each and every day. … I try to bring as much of Italy to them as possible with the assaggi [tastes] of gelato, Nutella, formaggio.” She also favors field trips and walking tours that encompass Little Italy, the Art Institute, or anywhere the Impact of Italian future can be seen, witnessed or tasted.

Modica also co-sponsors the Italian Club at Maine South: “We have cultural celebrations that include a holiday dinner, a ‘Natale breakfast’ complete with a visit from Babbo Natale, Carnevale celebrations, and soccer tournaments.” The club is student-led, so events vary depending on the leaders.

A teacher in District 207 since 2001, Modica always works hard to bring new Italian speakers out of their shells. “They’re always hesitant to speak,” she notes. “They’re intimidated by their pronunciation, so I would say this is my greatest challenge: encouraging students to go beyond their comfort zone to converse with me and their peers in Italian.”

“My parents, Anna and Romolo Pigoni, came from the same town in northwest Toscana,” she says. “I think Ceserano is one of the most beautiful places in the world. It’s an ancient town that sits at the foot of the Apennines.” And from there, you can see the slopes, not far from the Cinque Terre, where Michelangelo quarried marble for his masterpieces.

It’s only fitting, then, that Pigoni-Miller teaches Italian to her 120 students as though it were an art. It isn’t easy, though, as those pupils span five levels, from Italian 1 to advanced placement study of language and culture.

“I think students should be immersed in the Italian language right from the beginning of Italian I,” Pigoni-Miller says. “They’re sometimes a bit intimidated when they walk into class the first day and I speak almost no English the entire period. But by the time that first period is over, they’re speaking Italian.”

For Pigoni-Miller, it’s a throwback to her own childhood. “I grew up in an Italian-speaking home,” she recalls. “In fact, I didn’t speak any English as a small child, so I’ve been love with the language and the culture from the beginning.” She credits a number of mentors and teachers with channeling her passion into a career path — including Joan Durkin at Mother Guerin High School, Professor Paul Giordano at Rosary College, and Professors Elissa Weaver, Rebecca West, and Paolo Chierchi at the University of Chicago.

At Ridgewood, she mixes Italian sights and sounds into her linguistic immersion so kids feel like they’ve been dropped into a classroom in Rome rather than Norridge. “Wherever students look, they’ll see posters and bulletin boards, and displays with monuments of Italian culture and art — from the most exalted, like Michelangelo’s Pietà, to the most everyday, like posters of delicious Italian regional foods.”

Speaking of food (and what Italian class would be complete without it?), panzerotti, arancini and tiramisù rank among the treats her students sample. “I also keep class fun by structuring my lessons around fun games and by engaging the students with technology such as YouTube videos, film, Prezis, and the like,” she adds.

Not all the learning takes place in class, though. Pigoni-Miller takes her students to places such as the Lyric Opera, the Art Institute of Chicago, Taylor Street, and the Italian Cultural Institute. “And this year I’m excited to start an Italian Immersion Day, at which our students will host students of Italian from a number of area high schools.”

Yet nothing could top the upcoming trip to Italy she’ll host in March 2014, where she’ll bring 25-40 students on a whirlwind educational tour of Venice, Florence, Pisa, Sorrento, Capri, Pompeii, and Rome.

Closer to home, “The most exciting thing I get to do as a teacher is spend time with my students,” she says. “My Ridgewood Rebels are kind, hard-working, funny, and a delight to be with. I love watching them grow, both as students of Italian and as people.”