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!

In the Veneto

When I first came to the Veneto, it was not my favourite part of Italy. After the Amalfi Coast, the lakes, and the rocky cliffs of Liguria, its plains seemed dull and the mountains on the horizon far more enticing than the flat fields that surrounded me.

That was before I discovered thunderstorms and the big, dramatic skies that come with them.

Vicenza

On Saturday, one of the other camp tutors and I went to Vicenza, which is a small town about 40 minutes on the train from Verona. We were planning to go to Lake Garda, but it was cloudy, so we went to the trian station and picked a destination at random, realising after we had bought the tickets that we should probably have checked if there was a train to come back. Luckily, there were plenty, and in fact our mistake turned out to be buying tickets for a EuroStar train (in Italy, that's just a fast train, not necessarily the one that goes under the channel!), which cost 3 times as much as the return journey on a Regionale train, but Vicenza was worth it. It's famous for its architecture, with the Basilica and many of the palazzi having been designed by Palladio, but we were also pretty impressed by the peace and quiet and the cold cucumber soup and wine at 80 cents a glass in the restaurant where we had lunch.

Summer Camp

After precisely 5 days in France, I was back in Italy. It was cold, grey and rainy as the train rushed its way across France but as soon as we crossed the border, the train slowed down and the sun came out. I spent only half an hour in sticky Milan before I was on my way out in to the bella part of Italia again, on my way to Verona.

For the past four years, I've worked every August at an English summer camp for kids in a small village in the Veneto. I started when I was a student, but despite the fact that I now have a real job, I keep going back because these two weeks in August are an experience of everything that is good about Italy. In the morning, we teach crazy Italian children useful phrases like “Bananas of the world, unite!” and in the afternoon, we have long naps, soak up the sunshine and stroll around Verona feeling smug about not being tourists.

The best part of the whole experience is that we stay with the family in their amazing 100 year old farmhouse where the water comes from a spring and the stairs going up to my bedroom are made of cool, bare stone. The house is so big that up until this year I didn't even know that the room that I'm sleeping in existed. We are ridiculously spoiled by the Nonna, a proper Italian grandmother, who cooks amazing food using fresh vegetables from the garden.

In fact, the children at the camp this year are calmer than they have ever been before and the past ten days have been ridiculously easy. Every so often they entertain us with questions such as “Why are your eyes that funny blue colour?”, “Are you Scottish or Moroccan?” (In this part of the world all foreigners are either Scottish camp tutors or travelling salesmen from Africa, apprently) and (my personal favourite) “What world are you from?” Obviously, we are partly there to widen the children's horizons, but at the same time, their innocence is nice. Where else would you find 13 year olds who don't know what Facebook is and are still happy to spend a week of their holidays singing the aforementioned banana song?