Dates for 2009 Italy Tour

5 December 2009 to 13 January 2010.

Northern Italy - Veneto Region

Melbourne Girls Grammar School Years 10 and 11 Italian students participated in a six week cultural immersion program in Italy from 5 December 2008 to 16 Janaury 2009. Students lived with voluntary host families in the Veneto region. They attended school and participated in day to day Italian culture in the areas of Verona, Venice, Treviso and Padova. The group then spent their final four nights in Rome.

Report by Rebecca Murray, Year 11 Student in 2008

On 5 December 2008, eight girls from MGGS embarked on the trip of a lifetime. Italy was the destination, and we’d been waiting for over a year for the moment to arrive when we would wave our families good-bye and board the plane for Malpensa Airport in Milan.

Armed with travel tips and Italian dictionaries, we eagerly sat through twenty-one hours on a plane and two hours on the train until we finally reached the station of Mestre, in the North East Italian region of Veneto. We were greeted by our Italian host families with many hugs and kisses and were immediately thrown into the deep end of Italian culture. Four girls were hosted close to the beautiful city of Padova, while another four called the smaller, yet no less stunning town of Treviso home for the six weeks of our European adventure.

Over the next few weeks we experienced a culture like no other, Italian food is the best in the world; the evidence is clear; pizza, pasta, anything else you could think of, all cooked to immaculate perfection. Our host families tried in vain to increase our waist-bands and were strangely confused when we declined our fifth helping. Christmas and New Year were excellent! We saw countless presepi (nativity scenes) and experienced so many new tastes, eating lentils to open a doorway of good fortune into the New Year.

School was a challenging yet unforgettable experience; we were constantly at the centre of our classmates’ attention, being asked questions such as ‘When is the Australian Christmas?’ and too many to name about kangaroos. We learnt so much about the difference in our education systems and made friends that we will never forget. Saying good-bye was sad but we all knew we would stay in touch and remember our families and their kindness forever.

The MGGS girls and our group leader, Ms Annarita Bardeggia were reunited at Padova for a lively trip to Rome in which experience after experience were recounted. Rome was amazing! With tours of the Colosseum, the Vatican City and hours upon hours of shopping, it was almost too much to believe that our trip had sadly come to an end. Though challenging at times, the Italian Exchange was one of the most rewarding and amazing experiences any of us could have imagined, and we will never forget all the laughs, tears, and beauty that we experienced in ITALIA!

Program Aims

The aim of this program is to gain firsthand knowledge of daily life, culture and traditions within the well established and secure structures of the family and school. The emphasis on hospitality make this a socially rewarding experience.

Volunteer host families open their hearts and homes to welcome exchange students into their families. Students share daily life with their host families, cooking and eating together, running into town on errands, talking, discovering and improving cultural sensitivity and language skills. Often students maintain a lifelong relationship with their host families.

The students develop their proficiency in Italian, gain confidence, self-awareness and a healthy perspective of Australian and Italian culture and hopefully, a desire to learn more about world affairs.