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On Monday, December 5, 2025, Assistant Professor of Transnational Italian Studies Luca Zipoli presented “Urban Palimpsests: A Student Symposium on the Italian Legacy in Global Philadelphia,” featuring presentations from students in his ITAL B240 course and opening remarks by the Consul General of Italy, Nico Frandi. The event was organized by the Department of Transnational Italian Studies and co-sponsored by the consulate general of Italy in Philadelphia, the Tri-Co Philly program, and Library and Information Technology Services (LITS). Monday also marked the launch of the ITAL B240 final project, an featuring locations and photos related to the Italian legacy in Philadelphia.
 

Professor Zipoli’s course, titled “Philadelphia the Global City: The Italian Legacy across Time,” was part of the Tri-Co Philly program this semester. It aimed to explore Philadelphia's hidden gems and untold stories through in-class discussions, field trips, experiential visits, and guest lectures. Over the course of the semester, students worked individually or in pairs or small groups to select and research a building, artwork, neighborhood, or point of interest in the city that bears witness to its Italian legacy.  “I was very fortunate,” said Professor Zipoli, “to embark on this fascinating journey with a class of 18 accomplished, passionate, curious, and rigorous Bi-Co students who worked very hard during the semester to investigate lesser-known aspects, topics, and protagonists of the city we live by.” The students’ chosen locations and research are featured on the website that was launched on Monday.
 

The website itself was made possible through a Digital Bryn Mawr Grant, which allowed Professor Zipoli and LITS to hire Eleanor Sullivan ’27, also a student in ITAL B240, as a Digital Scholarship Project Assistant. Sullivan worked closely with Educational and Scholarly Technology Assistants Cameron Boucher ’23 and Tessa Eisen ’23 to collect, organize, and encode the students’ research papers and photos for publication on the website. “Working with LITS and the Italian Department for this project was truly one of the highlights of my semester!” said Sullivan, “I am super grateful to have been given the opportunity to broaden my technical skills while also getting to intimately experience The Italian Global City on a deeper level than enrollment alone would have offered." As part of her work on the project, Sullivan assembled the metadata for the digital map and collection and learned to format text using Markdown, a lightweight markup language. The result is an interactive map and digital collection featuring 14  research papers, each on a distinct location in Philadelphia, and 86 images.
 

“As soon as I moved from Italy to Philadelphia in 2022,” Professor Zipoli told LITS, “I started reading, studying, and researching about the city’s history and arts, with a particular interest for the influence that past Italian culture exerted onto its diverse cultural heritage.” When he read the call for applications for Tri-Co Philly courses, he decided to transfer the passion and knowledge that he had acquired in his independent study into a course. To support his plans for creating a digital map as a final project for the course, Professor Zipoli applied for a Digital Bryn Mawr Grant in Spring 2025 and began working with LITS to build the website in early Fall 2025. Following the final symposium, he reflected, “I think that the students went above and beyond my expectations, because I ended up learning a lot myself from their discoveries, research, and interpretations.” 

A recording of the symposium can be found on the as well as on the .