Back to the Veneto

After a week of total relaxation, I was ready for the next stage of my Italian adventure – teaching English at summer camp. This year, the children were not only delightful, adorable and totally charming in the way that Italian children do best, they were also (relatively) calm, attentive and motivated to learn. It was a wonderful two weeks. It's also amazing, when you get away from the lake and the magnet for cultured German tourists that is Verona, how quickly you feel that you are deep in the heart of the “real” Italy. You can cycle for hours along the country lanes between the fields of sunflowers and corn, watching the light change as the hot sun sets on the hazy horizon. You watch chickens hatching from their eggs. You can go for a drink at the bar and, even though you haven't been there for a year, they still remember you. You buy an ice-cream at the gelateria and the owner gives you a personal invitation to sit with the locals on the plastic chairs by the roadside while under a starry sky. And, if that all sounds a bit too idyllic, you can get eaten alive by the hungriest, greediest, most tenacious mosquitoes in Italy.

For better or for worse, the sense of community in these small villages and the speed at which news travels became very evident to us this year. One of my friends received a surprise visit from a friend of hers who didn't know where we were staying. He had found the not very regular bus using the internet but when he arrived, he didn't know where to go, so he told the bus driver he was looking for the house where the English teachers were staying. The driver didn't know, but he quickly got on the phone to all his friends and was able to point my friend's friend in the right direction. The signora across the road showed him the right house and he found us ... as did the many, many men of a certain age who stopped us in the street wherever we went after that to ask us if we were the English girls staying at a certain well-known B and B!