Lately, I’ve been editing videos made during the Institute’s previous thirty-eight years.  We made most of them under our Project Italia label which you can see on our homepage (italic.org) under Galleria.  We made one on the Aurora Youth Program but it didn’t quite tell the whole story.  Hopefully, the new Aurora video will be ready next month and will also be posted in the Galleria.

For those of you unfamiliar with Aurora, the video will be uplifting.  Aurora means “dawn” in Italian, and was chosen to describe how the program would be the first light of heritage to children 10- to 12-years-old (5th & 6th graders).  Assigned to Saturday morning classes, these pre-teens were recruited through their schools, local newspaper ads, and word of mouth.  It was offered to all ethnic groups for only a $25 registration fee, but Italian American children made up the vast majority of students.  In the twenty years of operation, we grew to 14 classes on Long Island and all the boroughs of New York City.  Over 2,000 kids passed through the program.

The program consisted of four levels, totaling 24 lessons.  Students were provided free workbooks which contained Italian language lessons and Italian history in cartoon form.  We created the cartoons, and the language lessons were not overly ambitious.  This would be the children’s first exposure to a foreign language.  Learning pronunciation, masculine/feminine, noun-adjective agreement, plurals, and common idioms were all new to American kids, so we limited our goals.  We were unique in teaching the kids how much of English came from Latin root words, words that were almost identical in Italian—like Aurora!  We made sure they knew that Italy was the source of many things we live with today.

But, anyone who has taught knows that students of any age can’t just sit for an hour or two and pay attention.  By trial and error, we learned how to keep the kids fully engaged in the lessons by teaching them Italian songs, all kinds of bingo games with vocabulary, numbers and even pictures.  There were team games like the Mille Miglia road race up the Italian boot and memory board games.  At the beginning of each lesson, a student volunteered to be Tribune, a class spokesman, who was given a medallion to wear and allowed to interrupt the lesson for breaks or a different activity.  We taught leadership as well as Italian.

We served them Italian snacks at every lesson – Nutella before anyone ever heard of it, panettone, and Italian cookies.  We threw a pizza party after each level.  The logistics to sustain each standardized class were challenging.  Aurora needed field and back-office staffs, substitute teachers, and site directors.  We monitored attendance, critiqued teachers, and did payrolls. Except for the teachers and the office staff most were unpaid volunteers.

Funding came from state and local grants, something most Italian American organizations are unfamiliar with.  The rest of the money was raised by the Italic Institute through dues and donations but mainly from our annual galas at the Waldorf-Astoria:  $500 a seat!

Even the galas had an Aurora touch.  Volunteer students were formed into a Color Guard to parade the flags of Italy’s 20 regions at the start of many a gala.  They wore special uniforms and feathered hats like Italy’s famed Bersaglieri.

By 2007, times had changed.  Grants were hard to come by.  Our galas could no longer support Aurora and kids found other things to do on Saturday mornings now that video games and cell phones were filtering down to them.

Today, there may be Italian groups and cultural centers who hold after school classes but not on the scale of Aurora.  Intermarriage and American culture have diluted our younger generations.  I’ve often wrote that only ethnic religions like Greek Orthodox and Judaism can overcome such dilution.  There is no Italian Orthodox Church to link mandatory religious instruction with Italian heritage.  “Catholic” means universal!

Without inculcating heritage through formal schooling, families are left on their own – a haphazard way to carry on a magnificent legacy.  -JLM