Italian for Food Lovers: Speak Italian at the Table with Confidence

Shannon Dodge is a language educator, culinary enthusiast, and the founder of Dolce Lingua, a platform dedicated to teaching Italian through food culture. Born in Portland, Oregon, she first traveled to Italy at nineteen on a semester abroad program in Florence. What began as a academic exchange became a lifelong passion when she discovered that her best language lessons happened not in the classroom but in the kitchen of her host family's trattoria in the Oltrarno district.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Italian Language and Literature from the University of Oregon and a Master's degree in Second Language Acquisition from Middlebury College. She has lived in four Italian regions over the course of a decade — Tuscany, Emilia-Romagna, Campania, and Sicily — and credits her fluency not to textbooks but to conversations with pasta makers, cheesemongers, and the elderly women who shared their family recipes with her in exchange for help with English.

Shannon has taught Italian language and culture at Portland State University and the University of Bologna. Her work has appeared in La Gazzetta Italiana, The Foodie Traveler, and Cucina Naturale. She developed the curriculum for "Parla Come Mangi" (Speak Like You Eat), a workshop series that teaches Italian through hands-on cooking classes, currently running in Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco.

Her teaching philosophy centers on the belief that language acquisition is most effective when it is emotionally and sensorially engaged. She argues that vocabulary tied to taste, smell, and shared experience is retained more deeply than vocabulary learned through rote memorization — a principle that informs every chapter of Italian for Food Lovers.

When she is not writing or teaching, Shannon can be found testing regional pasta shapes in her home kitchen, maintaining a small herb garden, or planning her next research trip to a corner of Italy she has not yet explored. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her partner and an increasingly large collection of Italian cookbooks.