Borbala Samu is an associate professor of Modern Language Teaching. She teaches language teaching methodology and intercultural communication in undergraduate and master's degree courses, and intercultural pragmatics in the PhD program. She is involved in the training and professional development of language teachers both abroad and in Italy. She directs the second-level master's program in teaching Italian as a non-native language and participates in various national and international research projects (including the LMOOC4Slav project). Her research focuses on the application of Cognitive Grammar to teaching Italian as an L2, the development and assessment of pragmatic competence in L2, the development of teaching methodologies and techniques to foster intercultural communication in multilingual and multiethnic learning contexts, and the new learning environments emerging from the spread of Technology Enhanced Language Learning.

Francesca Malagnini’s research activity spans several fields. Specifically, she has focused on the analysis of ancient literary texts, with particular attention to the linguistic-philological and codicological study of Giovanni Boccaccio’s autographs, on the analysis of nineteenth-century literary texts—especially on the prose of Manzoni, also in relation to the inclusion in the Quarantana edition of the vignettes by Francesco Gonin. Other areas of interest also concern the study of Tommaseo as a lexicographer, journalist, poet, and educator; as well as the teaching of Italian and Italian as a second language (L2). Regarding the latter, she has produced a monograph on the relationship between the history of the language and teaching; she has written a normative grammar relating it to everyday language; she has outlined a diachronic overview of the language of the semi-literate. In recent years, she has devoted herself to the study of semi-literate wall writings from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries preserved in the Tezon on the island of Lazzaretto Nuovo in Venice and to another volume dedicated to the epigraphic writings of the Lazzaretto Vecchio of Venice. She also deals with lexicographic studies, writing articles for the Lessico Etimologico Italiano based at Saarbrucken University, conceived and previously directed by Max Pfister and now led by Wolfgang Schweickard.

She is currently a member of the research team for the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grants 2020 project entitled “Graff-IT, Writing on the Margins. Graffiti in Italy, 7th to 16th century” (April 22, 2021).

She was National Scientific Coordinator (PI) and coordinator of the lead unit at the University for Foreigners of Perugia from January 12, 2021, for the PRIN project “PHRAME - Phraseological Complexity Measures in learner Italian. Integrating eye tracking, computational and learner corpus methods to develop second language pedagogical resources,” project code 20178XXKFY, replacing the originator Stefania Spina.

From October 5, 2023 to February 28, 2026, she was a member of the research unit of the PRIN (PI Massimo Fanfani, replaced from November 10, 2023 by Donatella Martinelli) at the University of Parma in the project Archive of the Lexicography of the Nineteenth-Twentieth Century (ALON), approved by decree no. 901 of 21/06/2023, project code 20222FC7A8.

Roberto Vetrugno (1975) studied Modern Literature at the University of Pavia and was a student at Collegio Borromeo. He obtained his Ph.D. in Italian Linguistics and Stylistics at the University of Bologna, with a thesis dedicated to the language of the autograph letters of Baldassarre Castiglione. He has worked as a research fellow and adjunct professor at the University of Pavia, in 2013 as a visiting professor at the University of Tripoli, and later as a researcher at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń (Poland).

His main research activity concerns Renaissance correspondences and courtly language: together with others, he edited the edition of Castiglione’s epistolary (Turin, Einaudi 2016), to which he has devoted several contributions (Baldassar Castiglione, in Autografi dei letterati italiani, Rome 2009; The Language of Baldassar Castiglione as Epistolographer, Novara 2010; more recently, Castiglione in Milan, in Renaissance in Transit in Milan (1450-1525), Milan, University of Milan, 2021; The Archives of Castiglione, Rome, Viella, 2023; Courtly Lexicon. Glossary of the Letters of Baldassarre Castiglione, Bologna, I libri di Emil, 2024).

He has delved into the linguistic aspects of the letters of Isabella d’Este, Lucrezia Borgia, Vittoria Colonna and other noblewomen of the sixteenth century, and has collected his research in the volume "Prègola la non me voglia dementichare". Linguistic studies on the letters of Renaissance women, Milan, Franco Angeli 2025. Since 2016, he has engaged in research dedicated to the advanced levels of learning Italian as a second language, also from a diachronic perspective. Since 2019, as the rector’s delegate for the university’s documentary and library heritage, he has promoted a project to transcribe, analyze, and digitize the university’s historical archive, illustrated in the recent Treccani volume dedicated to the university’s history (Profiles of Learners and Italian L2 in the Historical Archive of the University for Foreigners of Perugia, in The University for Foreigners of Perugia. The history of a university open to the world, edited by Salvatore Cingari, Valerio De Cesaris, Gabriele Rigano, Roberto Vetrugno, Rome, Treccani, 2024, pp. 441-460). Since 2019 he has been Rector’s Delegate for the enhancement of the university’s documentary, bibliographic and artistic heritage.

Since September 2022, he has been president of the three-year degree course in Letters "Italian Language and Culture in the Digital World" and has founded DigitaLab, a meeting place for the presentation and implementation of research dedicated to digital culture.