Student Activities Manual for Percorsi: L'Italia attraverso la lingua e la cultura Francesca Italiano is the Director of the Italian Language Program at the University of Southern California. She has a Ph.D. from University of California, Los Angeles in Nineteenth Century Italian Literature and an M.S. from USC in Applied Linguistics. She is the coauthor of the literary reader Incontri Attuali and the author of the second edition of the intermediate program, Crescendo ! She is currently working with the USC Language Center in the development of the VIE (Virtual Italian Experience) video game, which is based on Percorsi . The VIE project is being funded by a two-year NEH grant. Irene Marchegiani is currently Coordinator of Student Teaching for European Languages at Stony Brook University, where she teaches second language acquisition methodology courses as well as courses in European Studies. Professor Marchegiani has taught Italian language, literature, and culture at all levels and has authored articles on contemporary Italian poetry, with a particular emphasis on women writers. She has conducted research and published articles on Italian epic poems and translated Torquato Tasso’s Aminta , which was awarded the prestigious “Diego Valeri” Monselice prize in 2002. With Francesca Italiano, she published the literary reader Incontri Attuali and the intermediate Italian program, Crescendo .