Penny Wirton and EPC – free Italian language courses for foreigners
The collaboration agreement between the Master’s Degree program in “Paper and Board Engineering” at the University of Pisa and the Mario Tobino ETS Foundation, which organizes the Penny Wirton School in Lucca, has been formally signed.
The aim of the agreement is twofold: to establish collaboration between the two institutions and to offer voluntary Italian language courses to students in the degree program who do not know Italian, in order to support their integration and preparation for the world of work in Italy.
The Mario Tobino ETS Foundation organizes the Penny Wirton School in Lucca, dedicated to teaching Italian to unaccompanied minors and non-EU adults. The school, which operates within the Foundation, stands out for its approach based on volunteer work and the commitment of its teachers. The methodology involves one-on-one teaching in small groups, without classes, registers, or formal assessments, and it is free for the students. The Master’s Degree course in “Paper and Cardboard Engineering” is held in Lucca, has been active since the 2020/2021 academic year, and is reserved for engineers from all over the world.
The course meets the needs expressed by representatives of the paper and corrugated cardboard sector, aiming to train well-rounded professionals with high specialization and adequate interdisciplinary training.
It is held entirely in English, but most enrolled students do not have prior knowledge of Italian, speaking their native language and English. It is important to note that for carrying out internships or accessing employment in the paper and cardboard sectors at the end of the two years of study, a basic knowledge of the Italian language is required. For the 2025/26 academic year, twenty-six students are enrolled, coming, in addition to Italy, from countries such as Russia, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Egypt, Algeria, Bangladesh, and Iran.
The Italian courses, held at the teaching premises of the degree program (in the classrooms of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Lucca, at 3 Via S. Micheletto), began in recent weeks and will continue until the end of May. As teachers, alongside the instructors from Penny Wirton, there are also the young men and women performing civil service within the Fondazione Coesione Sociale: Ludovica Fava, Alessandro Ghimenti, Emma Panigada, and Matilde Venosa. The president of the degree program, Marco Frosolini, expressed great appreciation for the availability and collaboration of Penny Wirton of Lucca and its director, Isabella Tobino. “Our students have a high level of education,” Frosolini explained, “as they are all already engineering graduates, but in order to enter the workforce, they need to learn the Italian language, viewed as a complement to their training for those who will be working in the area.
Having found a such broad and satisfactory availability on the part of Penny Wirton allowed us to include the Italian course as an additional service for our students. In this way, we are able to provide companies not only with specialized staff but also with staff who are immediately able to interact in Italian in the workplace.” “Our goal,” explains Isabella Tobino, president of the Foundation and head of Penny Wirton Lucca, “is the learning of the Italian language (speaking and writing), socialization, knowledge of rights and duties in Italy, and understanding both Italian culture and one’s own. Collaborating with the degree course and allowing young people with different cultural backgrounds and coming from many foreign countries to be together to learn our language seemed like an added value for the School and for the students who annually attend our courses.”
