About Me

I first visited Italy as a 15-year-old high school student traveling with my Latin class from Woodstock, Vermont.  It was this trip which kindled my desire to learn the language and return to these beautiful places, so I became an Italian major at Haverford/Bryn Mawr colleges and spent a semester in Florence attending the Middlebury College program.  When I graduated in 1991 I bought a one-way ticket to Florence and spent the next five years living and working there, with occasional visits home to Vermont.  I worked at a hotel, a plant nursery and a restaurant, and discovered my love of teaching when I began giving English lessons to students of all levels and all ages.  I then spent two years teaching business English to employees at a large engineering firm in Florence.

In 1997 I moved to Cambridge, MA and the following year embarked upon a Ph.D. in Italian language and literature at Harvard, which I completed in 2006. I was a teaching fellow at Harvard for 7 years and taught all levels of Italian, including courses on opera, Fascism, fairy tales and fables, and Dante.  As a life-long gardener and founder of Talbots’ Creative Gardening, I brought the worlds of Italian and gardening together in my thesis, “The English Landscape Garden in Italy: a Literary, Cultural and Artistic Debate.” I also taught a beginning month-long Italian course at MIT for their Independent Activities Period, and spent a year teaching Italian to voice students at the Boston Conservatory.