The Italian language is spoken by more than 70 million people residing all over the world. In this hemisphere there are more than 10 million descendants of immigrants from Italy living in countries from Canada to Argentina, with the United States second only to Italy itself in number of Italian-speaking residents. In addition to studying the grammatical aspects of Italian, students learn about the culture, history, cinema and literature of Italy, a country that for over two thousand years has been at the center of the artistic and cultural history of the western world.