The eight donors represented the local chapter of Unico, a national Italian-American service organization.

“We support them,” said Unico’s Mary Teresa Morrison of Cape’s Italian students, “and we’ll continue to support them.”

Italian teacher Cristina Christy said Unico contacted her first, offering to help in any way they could.

Ultimately, the organization pooled more than $500 to purchase the dictionaries.

“They’re an asset that I think is going to be very helpful to Cape,” Christy said. “They don’t just reach out and touch Italian people – education is a big focus for them.”

The word “unico” is Italian for unique, and it would also apply to Cape. The district is only the fourth in the state – and the first in Sussex County – to offer Italian.

Christy said student response was overwhelming.

“We actually had to turn kids down,” she said.

Christy teaches five sections of Italian I, 130 students total. Though Christy said she expects the sheen of novelty to wear off, she believes the enthusiasm of her students will give the program long legs.

“I have to say, of all the years I’ve been teaching Italian, this has been the best year for me,” she said. “It’s a lot of work, but I’m not scared of work.”

For Christy, Italian has been as much a way of life as a professional focus.

She spent her early life shuttling between the United States and Bologna, Italy, where her father, a political science professor at Dickinson University, directed a study-abroad program. Her mother taught Italian.

“He fell in love with Italy through exposure,” Christy said. She’s attempting a similar cultural exposure with her students, mixing grammar lessons with activities designed to broaden her students’ knowledge of culture and syntax.

As they recently watched an Italian film, Christy said, her students were engaged by the unique dialect and culture of Sicily, a large island off Italy’s southern coast.

She hopes learning a foreign tongue and exploring a foreign culture will help her students develop a wider worldview.

“I hope they walk away with a sense of tolerance,” she said.

While Cape originally hired Christy to teach Spanish, she admitted it isn’t her favorite language.

It’s gotten her plenty of jobs, she said, but her heart remained with the language she’d heard in the streets of Bologna. When the school gave her the green light for an Italian program, she was ecstatic.

“I’m so grateful to Cape for letting me do something I’ve always wanted to do,” she said.

Based in Fairfield, N.J., Unico was founded in 1922 as a service organization. Delaware’s first chapter was founded in 2007 in Rehoboth Beach, with Morrison as its first president.

It has since poured its efforts into community service, from mulching flowerbeds at the Children’s Beach House in Lewes to serving dinner to international students at St. Edmond’s Catholic Church in Rehoboth.