Dear devotees, please accept my humble obeisances. All glories to Srila Prabhupada!

With great pleasure we announce that for 10 weeks from May 13th 2007 until July 22nd 2007 the following courses will be available in Prabhupada-desa, Italy

• Mrdanga (according to the Gaudiya Vaisnava tradition, taught by Bablu Prabhu, from Vrndavana Gurukula)
• Sanskrit (according to the grammar of Jiva Gosvami, taught by Matsya Avatara Prabhu, from Srimad-Bhagavata Vidyapitham, Govardhana)
• Bhaktisastri (first part, taught by various teachers to be announced)

Many senior devotees agreed to come and give their association speaking about Srila Prabhupada (like Gurudas Prabhu and Srutakirti Prabhu) or other Krsna conscious topics (like His Holiness Candramauli Svami).

Courses will start with a minimum of 10 students. Accommodations are available for 32 persons. 21 new professional mrdangas are currently available for selling or renting during the courses.

You can come and stay for the full 10 weeks or for any period of time during this program and participate to one or more courses. The fee includes the courses cost, nice prasadam and accommodation in double room and it is calculated according to the number of days of your stay. The fee for the full 10 weeks courses is 12,00 euros a day (for a total of 840,00 euros) The fee for 4 to 9 full weeks is 13,30 euros a day The fee for 1 to 3 full weeks is 14,30 euros a day The fee for less than 1 full week is 16,00 euros a day.

In order to help us with the organization please subscribe the courses by April 8th 2007.

For any information please contact me by e-mail: Manohara.SDG@pamho.net

Your servant Manohara dasa

Further information about the place and the teachers:

Prabhupada-desa is situated in northern Italy in between the cities of Padua and Vicenza. The temple is an old Italian villa with garden and 25 acres of land. The presiding Deities are Sri Sri Gaura Nitai.

The address is:
Prabhupada-desa via Roma 9
36020 Albettone (VI) Italy

The phone numbers are Phone: +39 0444 790573 Fax: +39 0444 790676

The nearest airports are Venice (50' by car) Venice/Treviso (1h 20' by car), Milan/Bergamo (1h 30' by car) Bologna (1h 30' by car).

Biographical sketch of some of the teachers:

Bablu Das: Born in Godrumadvipa (Navadvipa) from a Vaisnava family, he studied mrdanga from young age with some of the best vaisnava musicians of Bengal. He used to play mrdanga when Srila Prabhupada was singing Jaya Radha Madhava during the very early days of the Mayapura Project. He has been the mrdanga teacher in Mayapura Gurukula from 1982 to 1995 and the mrdanga teacher in Vrndavana Gurukula from 1995. He is a master in both the tradition coming from Srinivasa Acarya and Narottama dasa Thakura and he is teaching students and writing books on vaisnava music in order to preserve the pure Gaudiya Vaisnava style.

Matsya Avatara dasa: A disciple of H.H Bhakti-tirtha Swami, was born in Sydney, Australia in 1980 and joined the Hare Krsna movement in Brisbane, Australia in 1997. There he rendered various services such as catering, teaching cooking classes, and doing deity worship. In Karttika 2001 he joined the 24-hour kirtana party in Vrndavana for almost 2 years and also did the VIHE Bhakti-sastri during his stay there in 2002. While doing the bhakti-sastri he started to also study Sanskrit and eventually realized he needed a teacher to make further progress in that field. Thus he moved to Govardhana in 2003 and sought the saintly association of H.G Gopiparanadhana Prabhu. Under his tutelage, he learned how to read the commentaries of the previous acaryas and was encouraged to begin the study of Srila Jiva Gosvami’s Sanskrit grammar called Hari-namamrta-vyakarana. After taking further lessons on Hari-namamrta-vyakarana from H.G Yadu Prabhu, he decided to translate the great work into English in its entirety. Since the inception of the BBT’s new Sanskrit school in Govardhana in 2005, Matsya Avatara dasa has been teaching the students there the Hari-namamrta-vyakarana in the format of a detailed two year course. The results have been wonderful.