On one recent day in Professor Matt Rusnak’s Italian class, the theme is one everyone can appreciate: food. Rusnak asks his students to list various Italian culinary delights, and hands shoot up with a slew of responses, everything from pasta to macchiato. Rusnak writes each item on the board, then explains the meaning of the suffixes and prefixes. That in turn leads to a discussion of singular and plural words.

The atmosphere is light, and Rusnak is patient, warm and friendly. He uses linguistic shortcuts to smooth the learning process and the students appear to grasp the information easily. The class functions as a unit and students have no trouble asking questions.

Rusnak, raised in Washington Crossing, studied at Temple, the University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers, earning several masters degrees and a doctorate. Initially his focus was on English literature but a student trip to Italy proved life-changing. He found the new culture fascinating, and he was suddenly faced with fresh new works to read.

“I travelled to Italy first as an undergraduate, with no money and only a tiny dictionary to help with the language,” says Rusnak, who has taught at Bucks for more than 15 years. “I’ve been back a few times a year over the last decade or so, but it remains a culture as fresh and ‘foreign’ as it was at first arrival. I find there many of the virtues we lack in America, and also many of the defects that we thankfully do not suffer from in our New World.”

Rusnak’s love of Italian culture led to his first book, a translation of “Galateo: Or, The Rules of Polite Behavior,” by Giovanni Della Casa, a wealthy 16th-century diplomat. The book, first published in 1558, is a kind of Renaissance guide to manners and etiquette, and covers everything from yawning in public to how one should use a handkerchief.
As Della Casa writes, “You do not want, when you blow your nose, to then open the hanky and gaze at your snot as if pearls or rubies might have descended from your brains.”
As Rusnak describes it, “Galateo” “talks much about what to do and say in order to cut a fine figure in society.” For example, “The Italians were perhaps the first to use forks at the table, and it is still frowned upon by many to drink out of a bottle; you should always use a cup,” Rusnak says.

Likewise, “Americans by and large tend to follow ‘early to bed, early to rise’ and to be very punctual, while Italians tend to live less a 9-5 day,” Rusnak says. “In fact, it is uncommon to have dinner before 7:30 p.m., and in some places in Italy they eat much later. American ‘big breakfasts’ don’t exist in Italy, nor such pseudo-Italian foods as the Italian hoagie or Italian salad dressing.”

“Galateo” has always been popular in Italy, but Rusnak had seen enough rude behavior in his home country to decide that the time was right for an English translation.
He seems to have been right. The book received favorable reviews in The New York Times and The Washington Post. In the Post, Michael Dirda wrote that “in this new translation, M.F. Rusnak argues that ‘Galateo’ should also be regarded as literature (and even a possible influence on Shakespeare). We learn from Rusnak’s engaging introduction that Della Casa was the finest Italian poet writing between Tasso and Ariosto and that his prose was admired for its purity and refinement. The new translation brings home its surprising mix of the elevated and the down-to-earth.”

Rusnak is already at work on his next book, about the homes of famous Italians in Florence. It will be, in part, an art book that includes translations of plaques and signs. “During my most recent stay in Florence, I got to spend some time with Count Pandolfini. He lives in a palace designed in the Renaissance… his family has lived in the same property for many generations.”

Rusnak’s travels have taken him through much of Italy. He has taught in Urbino, and has seen much of Umbria, and Spello, but says he’ll always be partial to Florence and Tuscany. “Don’t let anyone tell you it’s (Tuscany and Florence) overrated!” he says.

For a time, he was partial to museums and public buildings. Lately he prefers visiting the buildings and environs where Italy’s most notable figures such as Leonardo Da Vinci and Galileo – once lived or worked. “These places have tended to be overlooked or forgotten in the tourist guidebooks over the last century, but they are very suggestive and interesting,” Rusnak says.