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 Italian textbook, 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, Professor Emerita of Italian Language and Literature at California State University - Long Beach, is currently Coordinator of Student Teaching for European Languages at the State University of New York - Stony Brook, where she teaches second language acquisition methodology courses as well as courses in European Studies. At CSULB, from 1985 to 1999 she was the Director of the Italian program. Professor Marchegiani has taught Italian language, literature, and culture at all levels. She has written articles on Giacomo Leopardi and on contemporary Italian poetry, with a particular emphasis on women writers. She edited the volume of poetry Landof Time (Chelsea Edition, 2006) by Luigi Fontanella and co-edited The Poetics of Place: Florence imagined (Olschki, 2001). She has conducted research and published articles on Italian epic poems about Cristopher Columbus and on second language acquisition. In collaboration with Professor Charles Jernigan, she has translated Torquato Tasso's Aminta (Italica Press, 2000), which was awarded the prestigious "Diego Valeri" Monselice prize in 2002. She has co-translated other volumes of poetry including The Star of Free Will by Maria Luisa Spaziani. Professor Marchegiani has published several of her poems in various poetry journals, in Italy and in the U.S.A., and in 2004 she published La vita in cerchio, her first collection of poetry. She is member of the editorial board of the literary journals Gradiva and Journal of Italian Translation. With Francesca Italiano, she published the literary reader Incontri Attuali and the intermediate Italian textbook Crescendo.