History and Italian

History and Italian is a degree that pairs one of the world's great humanistic disciplines with the language and culture of a country whose contribution to European and global civilisation has been without parallel. Italy is not simply the source of the Renaissance and the Roman Empire; it is also the home of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, of Machiavelli and Vico, of Verdi and Puccini, of Gramsci and Calvino, and of a contemporary culture of remarkable vitality and complexity. Studying Italian alongside history gives you both the linguistic access to Italian texts and the historical frameworks to understand their contexts.

At the University of Oxford, this four-year full-time programme benefits from Oxford's extraordinary concentration of expertise in both history and Italian studies. The history faculty is among the finest in the world, with strength across all periods and regions, and the Italian department combines rigorous language teaching with literary, cultural, and historical scholarship. Oxford's tutorial system means you receive intensive engagement with expert academics in both disciplines, developing the analytical and argumentative skills that sustained scholarly work requires.

You will develop advanced Italian language proficiency, study Italian literature and culture from the medieval period to the present, and engage with history across periods and regions, developing research skills and the capacity to construct original historical arguments from primary sources. The combination of language and historical study is particularly powerful for the study of Italy, where historical archives, literary texts, and material culture are accessible to you in their original language.

Graduates of history and Italian from Oxford move into an enormous range of careers, including diplomacy, international business, academic research, journalism, publishing, heritage, the arts, law, and the civil service. The analytical and communication skills developed across both disciplines are among the most transferable any degree can provide.