Featured Student of the Week: Beth Mazza Robertson
By Sarah Eckert | 2-minute read
Beth Mazza Robertson radiates gratitude and excitement as she tells me about her journey of connecting with her family’s Italian heritage. Her great grandparents emigrated from Italy to the United States in 1903 and 1905. It was Christina Cappy, BLI’s founder, who first told Beth that she may be eligible for dual citizenship. Since that conversation two and a half years ago, she has delved deeply into her family tree, met with the Italian consulate in San Francisco, and is now waiting to be officially recognized and handed her EU passport. She plans to one day move to Italy.
Beth has been taking Italian lessons at the institute for a few years now and has taken her learning beyond the classroom in so many ways. When she accompanied her daughter on a study abroad trip to Florence, she signed up for Italian lessons in which the only language all the students had in common, the language the teacher spoke and the textbook was written in, was Italian. This was a big challenge and she felt that many of the other students were far more advanced than she was. By the end, though, her skills and confidence had grown tremendously and she had made a few new friends.
“If you’re traveling somewhere and you want to learn the language, I would highly recommend it,” she shares. “Most of the classes are in the morning so you could easily go and still have plenty of time to be a tourist. It’s not expensive either, I was surprised to find.”
She also started the Italian Club of Bend, through which she recently started hosting meet-ups to play Bocce, a lawn ball game which I have played before but have never heard pronounced as beautifully as when I heard Beth say it! She posts to the Facebook group whenever she discovers something authentically Italian around the Bend area, and sees the group as another wonderful way to find others to practice speaking the language with.
“The most beautiful thing about learning Italian is the connection I feel to the culture,” Beth tells me. Home and family are very important to her, and she sees these values reflected in Italy’s generous citizenship program. She explains it like this: “If your grandpa was Italian, you’re Italian.”
She also tells me that hers is a family of language learners. In fact, her first experience with BLI was through her son, who took Japanese classes in preparation for a language immersion school in Tokyo. Hearing about her children’s endeavors, it’s clear that Beth passed down to them her love for travel and language, and couldn’t be more proud of all that they are doing. Her son just moved to Yamagata, Japan to be an English teacher, and her daughter is moving to London this fall for graduate school, studying archaeology.
Without the BLI community, Beth doesn’t know if she ever would have found out she was eligible for Italian citizenship. She loves that she’s been able to connect with others who share her love of Italy. “I’m so glad I found them,” she says. Her story is a true reflection of the power of language learning to transform our lives and bring us closer to the places we come from and the places we hope to go.
