The teacher stands in front of the class, arms spread wide, gesticulating widly. He appears to have made a joke, and his students burst into laughter.
But most visitors to the Accademia Vivarium Novum can only guess at the meaning of what is being said. In fact, entering this old building in a tiny undiscovered corner of Italy feels like stepping into an entirely different world.
That’s partly thanks to the dreamy location: a stunning villa in the rolling hills of the Frascati countryside, near Rome. But it’s also because everyone here speaks a language that, in most other countries, is considered dead: Latin.
Every year, people travel to the academy from around the world to study Latin and ancient Greek.
From October to June, up to 40 students aged between 16 and 25 live and study here – and only men are allowed. In the summer months, however, the academy runs classes for people of all ages and genders.
The youngest student in the 2018 contingent was just 12 years old; the oldest 60. The summer course costs US$6,100, but despite the price tag, the course was oversubscribed this year.
“This is not a holiday,” says Luigi Miraglia, head and founder of the academy and one of the world’s leading Latin scholars. His students call him Aloysius – all teachers and students here have a Latin name.
The course consists of 12 hours a day of Latin and Greek study, Miraglia says. And that doesn’t mean breaking it down into smaller parts and translating, like you would when learning French in school.
It means reading it, speaking it, singing it, and above all, developing a true feel for the language.
“We must learn Latin in a way that doesn’t make it seem like a strange, special language,” Miraglia says. “You will learn more here in two months than in five years in school.”
According to a Eurostat study from 2012, Latin is still part of the school curriculum in many European countries, but often only as an optional subject, or in specialist schools.
In Italy, whose national language derives directly from Latin, it is a compulsory subject in traditional public secondary schools.
In Germany, where around 8 per cent of schoolchildren learn Latin, it is the third most popular foreign language after French and English. In Britain, meanwhile, it is taught in only a handful of schools.
While Latin used to be a compulsory subject for certain paths of study, such as medicine, that is no longer the case.
So the question is:
Why bother to study it?
Some experts say learning Latin helps with learning in general.
But Hartmut Loos, head of the German Classicists Association, doesn’t necessarily agree. “Other subjects do that as well – it is not a unique feature of Latin,” says Loos.
“It’s more about reflecting on language and communication in past times, and the common heritage of Europe,” he adds.
When Latin is taught in schools, it tends to be a case of three years of grammar and vocab, followed by attempts to translate some of the classics, such as Caesar’s commentaries on the Gallic Wars or Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.”
“Students might feel a bit less put off with a different approach,” Miraglia says.
At the academy, things are done differently. The language is brought to life through plays, choral singing and even everyday conversation.
The students come from all over the world — China, Brazil, France, Korea, Germany.
English is strictly forbidden. The students greet each other in the corridors with a “Salve,” and use “Gratias” to say thank you. The bins are labelled with the words “Materies euplastica” and “Charta cuiuslibet generis” — plastic and paper.
“Lots of people say it’s a dead language, so you shouldn’t speak it. Utter rubbish!” says student Benjamin Stolz, from Germany. “If you are only speaking Latin, then eventually you start to think in Latin, to dream in Latin.”
Over lunch, the 29-year-old asks a fellow student to pass the cheese — “Da mihi caseum” — and wishes him “Bene sapiat,” a pleasant meal.
But for Miraglia, it’s about more than just mastering the language. He wants his students to learn a new way of seeing the world.
They should leave with a feel for the character of the language, for the spirit of times past, for the way that ancient philosophers and teachers used to think. “In Latin, sometimes it’s harder to ask for a coffee than to discuss the theories of Plato,” he says. – dpa
