""Non e sempre la solita storia" helps students explore the language and culture of Italy in a meaningful, up-to-date context. Readers will engage in and learn from the story of a group of young artists who start their own company. They collaborate with an American artist to stage an exhibition set in Ca' Dario -- the most haunted house in Venice.
An immersion text, the language, grammar, and cultural instruction come together seamlessly. A visual dictionary provides pictorial clues to new words in the texts. True/false questions after each reading allow students to immediately check comprehension. Target vocabulary and grammatical structures are recycled throughout the text for review and to function as building blocks for new language and conversational skills. All verbs are used in the past tense, as is appropriate for the intermediate level.
"Non e sempre la solita storia" is designed to be a companion reader to standard textbooks. It is appropriate for intermediate Italian courses in university programs, and can also serve as a review and refresher for students at the advanced level. Chiara Carnelos is a graduate of the University of Padua, Italy, where she studied Italian and Comparative literature. She also studied in Dublin and Paris. She has taught at the Italian Cultural Center in San Diego, and she currently teaches at the University of California, San Diego. She has twice received the Award in Teaching Excellence from the Linguistics Language Program at UCSD. She is a five-time winner of the international poetry contest "Premio Internazionale Giovani E Poesia - Triuggio" in Italy and many others, notably the poetry contest "Voci del Vajont."