This year, the Árpád Tóth High School in Debrecen hosted the Festival d’Italiano on March 22-23. The lecturers of the Italian Department of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Debrecen also contributed to the compilation of the programs, tasks and competitions.
In 2024, the Italian language in Hungary will celebrate two important anniversaries: one hundred years ago, at the suggestion of Minister Kunó Klebelsberg, a law (the XI of 1924) introduced the teaching of the Italian language in our country, and since 1974 – for half a century – the Festival d’Italiano has been organized almost every year, which creates an opportunity for students of secondary education institutions that teach the Italian language to demonstrate their knowledge and various present their language skills in competitions.
Almost 800 participants came to the festival from different parts of the country, including Budapest, Nyíregyháza, Győr, Pécs and Szeged. Teams from Debrecen, made up of students from the city’s eight Italian-language high schools, also took part in the competition.
The University of Debrecen is one of the five Hungarian higher education institutions that offer courses in the Italian language.
We maintain close relations with the high schools teaching Italian in the region and in Debrecen, so we gladly took on the task of participating in the preparation of the two-day program and partly in the implementation
– Pete László said.
The head of the Faculty of Humanities Italian Department emphasized: that the meeting was a great opportunity to broaden professional relations beyond the region, and the competition, especially the Italian-language “break room” organized at the University of Debrecen, allowed the visiting students to get to know the institution.
All this will be really important when, after completing their high school studies, they have to decide which university to continue their higher studies in Italian at
– emphasized the head of the department.
As in previous years, the competition was announced by Árpád Tóth High School in individual, group, written and oral categories.
Among the tasks were poetry and prose recitation, interpretation competition, Who knows more about Italy? quiz competition, story writing and cultural history competition, the latter of which was on the topic of Marco Polo, on the occasion of the 770th anniversary of the birth and 700th anniversary of the death of the Venetian merchant and traveler.
The teachers of the Faculty of Humanities Italian Department announced a prose translation and essay competition related to Italian memories in Hungary and the participants were invited to escape rooms on both days of the program.
In the first stage of the four-act rehearsal, the 26 teams of four had to prove themselves in history and geography, then gastronomy, then the arts, and finally fashion, i.e. Italian design.
The Italian Department rewarded the performance of the best with university gifts and a book prize.
(unideb.hu)
