Jenna Soleo Shanks, Assistant Professor of Theater History at UMD, grew up surrounded by her Italian American family on Long Island. Later in life when she studied the language further and traveled to Italy for research, she marveled at the dialectical variations from region to region - and even town to town - across the Apennine Peninsula. Despite these differences, she notes that Italians as a whole passionately savor their language.
She shares with us the poem "Io v'amo sol perche" (I love you simply because) by Torquato Tasso, born in Sorrento in 1544. Suffering from mental illness, he died at the age of 51, just a few days prior to being named by Pope Clement VIII as the "king of poets."
La Poesia (poetry) is produced at KUMD with funding provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.