After its official institutionalization in 1990, the initial training of secondary- education teachers was implemented in Italy in the 1999/2000 academic year by the introduction of the so-called "Scuola di specializzazione per l'insegnamento nella scuola secondaria", a two-year postgraduate course leading to a final examination. This important step in the Italian educational system pointed to the necessity to define precisely the contents and the form of initial training for teachers. This paper deals specifically with the initial formation of German language teachers, as exemplified by the training provided in the Scuola di Specializzazione in Trieste. Far frorn proposing an ideal model to be applied, the author shows how this course has been applied at the University of Trieste (the observations refer to the academic years 1999/2000 and 2000/2001) and raises some crucial issues of initial training for foreign language teachers. In order to provide a basis for tackling these issues, several other training models that are offered in other European countries are presented.
