Interestingly enough the surge of interest is not as much propelled by 2nd or 3rd generation Italians, but Italians recently arrived, mostly of the professional class, and also by Non Italians who have fallen in love with Italian Culture. 

Also note the goal of growing to eight grades within five years, and so ever encouraging a plan to form a consortium of Bay Area Italian preschools to share administration, teachers, health care costs and professional development.

Personally, I am MOST pleased by the fact that these are NOT merely Italian Language Schools, But Italian CULTURAL Schools.

Bay Area is Biggest Little Italy for Preschools
San Francisco Chronicle; Patricia Yollin; Sunday, August 2, 2009

Abigail Call corrects her mother's grammar when they speak Italian and has started to teach her father the language, sometimes making up nonexistent words just to toy with him a bit. She is not quite 4 years old.

"When she's by herself with her dolls, she sings all these songs in Italian," said Abigail's mother, Jessica Hall. "I'm a parent, so of course it makes me want to cry - to think that her little brain, in those unprompted moments of alone time, chooses to do that."

Abigail doesn't know it yet, but she is part of a trend.

Italian playgroups, preschools and language centers for children are proliferating in the Bay Area these days in a manner unequaled anywhere in the country, according to Marco Salardi of the Italian Consulate in San Francisco.

"It's just exploding," said Salardi, director of the consulate's office of education. "It's very new. And it's becoming bigger and bigger. It's a very nice surprise."

La Piccola Scuola Italiana on Potrero Hill in San Francisco. Spazio Italiano Language Center in North Beach. The tiny Vittoria Italian Preschool in the Mission District. Girotondo Italian School and Parliamo Italiano, both in Marin County. Mondo Bambini in Berkeley, purchased a few months ago by Girotondo so it can expand to meet a swelling demand in the East Bay.

"This is unique in the country," said Matteo Daste, a lawyer who co-founded the nonprofit Business Association Italy America four years ago in San Francisco, a city with 1,850 Italian citizens. "It's fueled by new demographics on the Italian side and new cultural interest on the American side. There has been a new wave of Italian immigration to the Bay Area in the last 10 or 15 years. And it's not driven by poverty; it's driven by opportunity."

The Italian professionals, investors, entrepreneurs and high-tech experts flocking to the region are trying to raise offspring equally at home in Italy and the United States. And so, Genoa native Daste and his American wife send their older son to Girotondo.

"We want to have the kids grow up not only bilingual but bicultural," Daste said.

Sara Arrigoni Almaguer, co-founder of Parliamo Italiano in San Rafael and Mill Valley, said, "We want to give our children the same culture so that Italian is not like the language of aliens. It's important that my kids know I'm not weird."

The preschool's co-founder, Sara Bianchi Chamberlin, agreed. "Italians like to let their roots grow. And there is a big community now of Italians in their 30s and 40s."

A second group of preschool patrons consists of Italian Americans. Some parents want to pass down the language they heard growing up. Others, forbidden to speak Italian by their parents or grandparents, hope their children can reconnect with a heritage that was closeted in the push to become "real Americans."

Ilaria Giannini, the Roman founder of Spazio Italiano, said, "The grandparents are so happy to hear their grandchildren singing the same song they used to sing."

The quest to assimilate, which began many decades ago, has been replaced by a booming interest in bilingualism.

"I've lived on three continents," said Ernesto Diaz, a math professor from Madrid who sends his two daughters to Parliamo Italiano. "It's important to be able to communicate. Even if you're not fluent, being exposed to other ways of thinking is a good thing."

Other preschool parents have no Italian blood. They simply love Italy and want to introduce their kids to a culture they consider healthy and worth emulating because it is social and well balanced.

"Somebody once said, 'There are two types of people: Italians and people who want to be,' " said Mill Valley resident Elise Paisley, as she pretended to drink an empty cup of espresso prepared by her 4-year-old daughter, Bronwyn Stocks, on a recent morning at Spazio Italiano.

"The culture of the school is very warm, very nurturing and accepting - like Italy," Paisley said. "And Bronwyn is Bibi when she's here because Italians can't say Bronwyn. They don't even have a 'w' the language."

On Wednesdays, Angela Chou drives up from San Mateo with her son and daughter to attend a morning session at Spazio Italiano. Chou is Chinese American, while her husband is a mix of French, German, English and Scottish. But their children, 2 1/2-year-old Isabella and 4 1/2-year-old Samson, are fluent in Italian, a language their mother learned in college at the University of Padua. The first words they ever spoke were Italian - si and acqua (yes and water) from Samson and torta and patata (cake and potato) from his sister.

When they are by themselves, Chou and her children converse mostly in Italian.

"Some people have no clue what we're speaking," she said. "They'll say, 'It's not Mandarin, is it?' When we went to Italy two years ago, Samson got so excited. He said, 'Mama, everyone speaks Italian here.' He told me recently that trees are masculine and their fruit is feminine. I didn't know that."

The passion of Paisley and Chou for Italy reflects a fascination with Italian culture throughout the Bay Area, which has rich and deep ties to Italy - and is in California, with almost 1.5 million residents of Italian descent, third highest in the United States after New York and New Jersey.

"Whenever I'm walking around with my daughters and we're speaking Italian, we're stopped constantly by people who tell us how crazy they are about Italy," said Angelo Del Priore of Albany, co-founder of Mondo Bambini.

The surge in interest is also in keeping with a push by parents to expose their children to a second language at a very early age.

"No matter what language you're studying, it gets the neurons firing," said Ilia Salamone-Smith, who in 1987 started Primo Programma, the first nonprofit in the Bay Area devoted to teaching Italian to children.

Each school or language center has a distinct personality and programs tailored to different ages. All insist on full immersion, and most offer . Most also rely on the Reggio Emilia approach to education.

"It's a philosophy that believes children should be protagonists in the learning process," said Modena native Valentina Imbeni, director of La Piccola Scuola, which opened in 2003 as the first Italian preschool in the Bay Area. "A child should be seen as someone intelligent and capable who deserves respect."

Imbeni is working on a plan to form a consortium of Bay Area Italian preschools to share administration, teachers, health care costs and professional development. Even now, any of them could be plopped down in Italy without a hint of incongruity.

At La Piccola Scuola, the bins of supplies are marked in Italian, so one quickly learns that pencils are matite, sparkles are brillantini and paper is carta. At Parliamo Italiano, children celebrated the Feast of the Epiphany on Jan. 6, much as their counterparts did in Italy, and received a visit from La Befana, a good witch beloved by Italian kids. And at Girotondo, the children make pizza from scratch and dine on risotto with zucchini and tofu.

"We are in an Italian school, and we are in the United States," said Rosella Pusateri, the Milan-born director. "That's our reality."

Girotondo, which began as a playgroup nearly six years ago and was the first Italian preschool in California to be licensed by the state, will open a first grade in fall 2010, with a goal of growing to eight grades within five years.

The director's 5-year-old son, Luca Pusateri-Gissendaner, is one of the students at Girotondo.

"I was seriously concerned about me being the only person talking to my son in Italian," Pusateri said. "I want to raise someone who is social and secure, with a community that loves him and cares about him.

"That's the reason Girotondo started. I am far away from my country and my family, and I can't spend my time feeling nostalgic about what I don't have." -- 

Pat Yollin is a Bay Area writer who has visited Italy often.

This article appeared on page U - 6 of the San Francisco Chronicle

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/
article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/31/CMV018BNVB.DTL
 

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