MELBOURNE - When his school, the Convitto Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele II in Cagliari, presented third-year high school students with the possibility of a short exchange program with an Australian school, Francesco Protto didn’t think twice. He immediately stepped forward and applied. His application was successful based on academic results and, more importantly, a promising interview.
Not long after, he boarded a plane to Melbourne where he is attending Year 11 classes at Marcellin College in Bulleen.
Francesco is a quiet, thoughtful boy with a great ability to adapt. As soon as he landed, he realised the difference between the English he had studied at school and the English he heard spoken by his classmates and teachers.
“When I arrived I was bewildered and had a bit of a hard time with the Australian accent, because in Italy we study British English, so I had to get used to the strong local accent over time,” explains Francesco.
Matteo Brazzale, another student at Marcellin College, is hosting Francesco for the duration of his stay in Australia in anticipation of the exchange planned towards the end of the year.
Francesco emphasises the warmth and hospitality of the Brazzale family. “They made me feel at home straight away, they welcomed me like family.”
The Italian student often highlights the welcome given to him by his Australian family, classmates and teachers, who he credits with “making me passionate about the lessons, in which I have been able to participate a lot lately”.
“In particular Business Management, which at my school is not among the subjects offered, but which I was able to discover during this adventure and I like a lot.
“Compared to the Italian school,” Francesco points out, “I find the Australian school much more open to the world. During English lessons, for example, we read the news in the newspapers, something we don’t often do in Italy”.
The experience is a brief one, but it seems to have given Francesco the motivation to continue travelling and discovering the world and, perhaps in the future, return Down Under for university.
Matteo, the exchange ‘brother’, watches his guest attentively, trying to understand every single Italian word spoken by Francesco. At the end of November, it will be his turn to fly to Cagliari and stay with Francesco’s family, where he will spend Christmas and his 17th birthday.
“I can’t wait to get to know a new corner of Italy and improve my language, even though I know that school will be very demanding and that I won’t be able to choose my favourite subjects, like in Australia,” shares Matteo.
The grandson of two people from Veneto who left Asiago to move to Australia in the 1950s, Matteo decided to study Italian in order to reconnect with his roots, even though he never found studying the language particularly easy.
“The grammar is not very difficult and neither is the written part, but I find the oral part particularly tricky, especially because everyone speaks very fast,” he says.
Despite their age, the two young men seem to be looking to the future with great clarity and awareness. Matteo hopes that the trip to Italy will help him clarify his ideas on which path to take in the coming years, or as he puts it; “open my mind and horizons”.
Marcellin College offers three languages to its more than 1300 students. Italian, which for years has been the language of choice for the area’s large Italian community, is now tied with Chinese, says Head of Languages John DiNatale.
“Our job is to continue to promote the study of languages, encouraging young people with continuous initiatives,” DiNatale explains. “With this in mind, we’ve started exchanges with the school in Cagliari, where Francesco Protto comes from, but also with an institute in Cosenza, Calabria, and then there is the tour we organise in Italy every two years”.
The school and its Italian teachers place great emphasis on these kinds of opportunities for the students, and it is thanks to contacts within the Italian community in Melbourne that they were able to organise the exchange.
Francesco’s adventure and Matteo’s upcoming one in Cagliari owe a lot to the intervention of Rosanna’s Sardinian Cultural Association and its passionate president, Paolo Lostia.
Lostia shared his contacts in Sardinia and helped Marcellin College set up the collaboration with the Convitto Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele II School.
Alfio Camarda, Italian teacher at Marcellin College, emphasises how language teaching faces the challenge of encouraging “those students who had to study their second language behind a screen during the pandemic and now don’t want to know any more”.
“It is important,” Camarda emphasises, “to present students with the image of Italy as a modern nation, to make them understand that it is a country in the vanguard and that it has a history that continues, that did not stop in the 1950s.”
