Learning Italian in Beautiful Sestri Levante

After visiting Genoa for a few days, we took the train along the Ligurian coast to the beach town of Sestri Levante, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) to the east.

The ABC School of Italian Language and Culture, which we had attended in Florence for six weeks earlier this year, has a campus in Sestri Levante. We had heard that it was a beautiful little town, so we had decided to spend three weeks in Sestri Levante to continue learning Italian. The school helped us find a short-term rental of a lovely apartment in a renovated palazzo along the Gromolo River.

We got settled into the apartment and then set out on foot to find the school and to buy some groceries. Our walk to school was almost a mile each way, but at least the walk was relatively flat. The last half of the route was through the commercial/tourist district near the beaches, which was lined with shops, restaurants, and gelaterias. Along the way, we caught this quintessentially Italian scene of four nonne (grandmothers) on a bench enjoying their gelato and no doubt solving the world’s problems.

The ABC School’s location in Sestri Levante is literally right on the town’s prettiest beach, along the Bay of Silence. We took this photo from the sidewalk in front of the entrance to the school.

Walking further down the beach gave us a better look at the buildings surrounding the end of the Bay of Silence–so called because of the intimate atmosphere created by the thin sand arch surrounded by Ligurian houses and the two convents (one still active, the other now an event space) that are located at the two ends. For several years in a row, Tripadvisor named this beach as among the ten most beautiful in Italy, and we could easily see why.

Our classes started the next morning. We did not have class together, because I (David) had taken more advanced, traditional lessons while we were in Florence, while Cheryl–and most of the rest of our Road Scholar group–took a special “Survival Italian” course that focused more on practical Italian for travelers than on traditional grammar instruction. The ABC School curriculum is structured around the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), which groups language proficiency skills into six levels: A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, and C2. The school further divides each of these levels into .1 and .2 sub-levels, with each sub-level requiring 2-3 weeks of instruction. I had just started Level A2.2 when we left Florence, so I resumed my classes in Sestri Levante at that level, and finished about halfway into Level B1.1. Cheryl decided she wanted to start at the very beginning of the traditional course, so she completed Level A1.1 and was working on Level A1.2 at the end of our three weeks in Sestri Levante.

Every weekday, we each had 90 minutes of grammar instruction in the morning, followed by a 30-minute break, and then 90 minutes of conversation practice (which also included reading and writing). Because of the school’s location right on the beach, it was easy for us to relax with a cappuccino and a pastry during our break.

Just like in Florence, our teachers were excellent, as were the textbooks that the school had created. And because all of the instruction was in Italian, we got plenty of practice in listening and speaking.

Our classes weren’t all lectures, though. For example, one day Cheryl’s class went to the supermarket to learn the names of many different foods, and another day played a dominoes-like word matching game. And when my class was learning the “conditional mode” of verbs–which is used for, among other things, making recommendations or suggestions–Julia had us play a game where she taped a tag with a description of a situation on each of our backs, and then the rest of the class had to give recommendations to the tag-wearer that would help him or her guess the situation on their tag.

In addition to the language classes, the ABC School offered several tours and cultural activities during the afternoons and on Saturdays each week. After our first day of class, we joined Eliana, one of the teachers, on a climb up the hill at the end of the Levante Peninsula for some sightseeing and to get our bearings in the town.

Later in the first week, we joined many of our classmates for aperitivi and dinner at a villa situated high on the hill on the other side of the Bay of Silence, opposite the school. To get there, we had to walk around the end of the bay and then climb several flights of stairs and steep paths.

The beautiful villa at the end of the climb has been in the owners’ family for many generations. Our host for the evening was the current occupant, an artist who maintains her studio and a small apartment at the villa.

We had a million-dollar view from the terraced lawn in front of the villa…actually, much more than that, since we later learned that the villa would be valued at about €5 million (almost US$6 million) if it were ever to go on the market!

Every morning as we walked down the main shopping street to school, the view as we turned the corner took our breath away. Come along with me for 30 seconds and see for yourself:

We never tired of looking at the Bay of Silence from the third-floor window of the school, either. It didn’t hurt that we had perfect early fall weather for the entire three weeks that we were there.

Most days, we ate lunch after class at a restaurant in the shopping district, sometimes with one or more of our classmates–or sometimes, we just got gelato as an “appetizer” before eating back at our apartment.

Unlike during our spring stay in Florence, when we almost always had a tour or lecture in the afternoons after class, we made a conscious decision to devote most of our afternoons in Sestri Levante to homework and studying. But one evening during our second week, I made an exception and (after finishing my homework!) joined an evening “field trip” led by one of the school’s teachers to the Bisson Winery in nearby Riva Trigoso. Our tour of the winery included learning about how they age their spumonte underwater in the ocean in large metal cages, leaving on the bottles the sand and sea creatures that make their homes there. (The larger and more impressive the animal, the more the bottle sells for–sometimes upwards of €300–even though the wine inside is exactly the same.) We then got to taste two of their wines, accompanied by some antipasti, before walking back to the train station at dusk. (Click on the thumbnails below for the full-size version and caption.)

On two of our three weekends in Sestri Levante, we ventured further out of the city–once on our own to visit the famous Cinque Terre villages east of Sestri Levante, and the other on a school-led trip with Eliana to Santa Margherita Ligure and Portofino, to the west.

Our three weeks in Sestri Levante went by in a flash. Soon, we were saying goodbye to our classmates from all over the world–Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Japan, Peru, Brazil, and of course the United States–and walking down Via XV Aprile, the main shopping street, for the last time, enjoying the colors of the brightly painted buildings.

We left Sestri Levante feeling somewhat more confident in our Italian…now, we need lots of practice!