Another Italian, Maria Teresa Piccioli, known as Terri, was awarded the coveted Medal of the Order of Australia for her service to education and the Italian community in Sydney during a ceremony held at Government House this week.

“I will always remember it as a very emotional moment to receive this recognition,” Piccioli shared.

“My story was definitely one of privilege during my journey discovering this beautiful continent.

“My father was a diplomat and with my family I had the good fortune to travel the world. When I was just four months old they took me to Shanghai.”

Piccioli added that she had already been to Australia in the past, coming with her parents in the 1970s where they lived in Sydney for three years.

She was born in Bolzano to a Sicilian father from a town called Noto, in the province of Syracuse, who attended the Faculty of Political Science and graduated from Ca’ Foscari in Venice, before studying at the London School of Economics.

Piccioli’s mother, on the other hand, was Polish and met her father at the Italian embassy where they both worked.

“When we first came to Australia I went to school right here in Sydney, at Loreto Convent in Kirribilli,” she said.

“I didn’t think that years later I would return to Australia.”

Piccioli explains that she lived in Milan and attended Bocconi’s Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature where she met her husband who was enrolled in the Faculty of Engineering.

“I came back to Sydney with my husband who was offered a job in Australia as a young engineer, he was only 24 years old at the time,” Piccioli recalled.

“To be offered a job with an executive position was quite tempting and in Italy at the time you didn’t make a career out of it until after you were 50.”

Piccioli started her career at Sydney University as a part-time tutor and then also qualified to teach Italian.

She then went on to teach at Macquarie University as there was great interest in the Italian language despite no suitable degree course yet.

After completing a doctorate in linguistics in which she traced her first daughter’s bilingual journey for the first four years of her life, she set up a degree program at Macquarie.

“I did as much as I could to push for the teaching of Italian and raise awareness so that Italian would be included as a subject,” Piccioli explained.

“I did, in my own small way, what I could so that the language could be studied, both in schools and in universities,’ she added.

Picciolo then taught at the Australian Catholic University (ACU) for over ten years.

Meanwhile, at The Dante Alighieri Society, she held the positions of vice-president and president and continued to be involved in teaching and training at both Co.As.It and Com.It.Es.

Today, Terri Piccioli maintains a small Italian conversation class, reads a lot, travels to Italy for at least two months a year and follows both Italian cinema and theatre, but the activity that gives her most joy is teaching Italian to her grandchildren.