Imparare l’italiano con Corto Maltese - La laguna dei bei sogni

Imparare l’italiano con Corto Maltese - ...e di altri Romei e di altre Giuliette - A. Cagli, P. Diadori, E. Spinosa

This comic book is aimed at teenage and adult students of B2 – C1 level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (upper intermediate/ advanced). The volume, in full colour, presents a reduced version of the original story, information on the writer and the illustrator, on the most important characters of the story and its context. A wide variety of activities will accompany the student to the comprehension, global and analytical, and to the discovery of vocabulary, of the communicative elements and of the cultural, pragmatic and socio-linguistic aspects.

Corto Maltese is a comics series featuring an eponymous character, a complex sailor-adventurer. It was created by Italian comic book creator Hugo Pratt in 1967. The Corto Maltese series has been translated into numerous languages. Corto Maltese is a laconic sea captain adventuring during the early 20th century (1900-1920s). A "rogue with a heart of gold", he is tolerant and sympathetic to the underdog. Born in Valletta on July 10, 1887, he is a son of a British sailor from Cornwall and an Andalusian witch and prostitute known as "La Niña de Gibraltar". As a boy growing up in the Jewish quarter of Córdoba, Maltese discovered that he had no fate line on his palm and therefore carved his own with his father's razor, determining that his fate was his to choose. Although maintaining a neutral position, Corto instinctively supports the disadvantaged and oppressed. The character Corto Maltese is based on a famous Polish adventurer, author and explorer Ossendowski, who collaborated with Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, among others.

The volume La laguna dei bei sogni, where ‘there is no coming back from the dreamland’, tells the tale of an English lieutenant called Robin Stuart, who deserted in the First World War finding refuge among the Indians in Venezuela, on the Orinoco river banks. Corto Maltese attends to the soldier, who suffers from hallucinations and delirium resulting from high fever. Stuart, however, prefers to surrender to sweet dreams that deliver him from his cowardliness and let him die in peace.

Each volume is divided into three sections:

• in the first section, we find the introductory pages that present briefly the authors and the characters of the story, the context and some guided questions that will help the students during reading
• in the second section, we find the comic strips, with explication notes on the most difficult passages
• in the third part, we find exercises and activities that will accompany the students to a major deepening of the story through quizzes, games, in-depth analysis, and will help them to improve their Italian in an easy and fun way.

You can use this book either in classroom or for self-study, in silence or by listening to the radio set-up of the story, recorded by professional actors and enriched with music and sound effects. It is a motivating podcast (of about 21 minutes) that you can find here. Obviously, being a radio set-up, many times the lines do not exactly correspond to the ones of the paper comic. If you want to live a pleasant experience, we suggest that you listen to the set-up either before or after the reading. The acting of professional actors, supported by the music, creates perfectly the atmosphere and the images of the comic and it will transport you inside the story making you live every sensation with reality and making you eager to listen to the other available set-ups.