My Year Living in Italy!! 🇮🇹

Ciao!!

In 2018 I went to live in Italy for a year, which ended up being one of the most amazing experiences of my life!

I had no idea what I wanted to do after I finished high school but all I knew is that I've always wanted to live abroad and travel. So my parents suggested for me to go on a student exchange to Italy considering we knew exchange students that came to New Zealand and I thought that was an amazing idea to live in another country. So I signed up to an agency called WEP and once I had my visas and passport all sorted I embarked on my Italian journey.

So if you're wondering what an exchange is it's where you go live with another family within a country and you get to experience living in that country meaning you get to go to school and live in a town or city. Living in a country is so different from just traveling to a country because when your living in the country you immersing yourself in the culture and are becoming a local rather than a tourist. Lots of cultures appreciate this because your seeing the country for what it really is.

I lived with a lovely host family who treated me like I was apart of their family which was amazing for me because being away from home can be scary. I also got to meet other exchange students that were in my town which made my experience so much better as it's nice to have people who are going through the same thing as you and also gives you the chance to learn about other cultures as I got to meet people from all over including the US, Canada, Mexico, France, Brazil, Germany, Australia and of course Italy. Becoming friends with these exchange students means that I now have connections from all over the world and social media has been a huge help with keeping in touch with them.

I lived in a small town called Lecco which is on Lake Como and thirty minutes north of Milan!

The town was beautiful it had a beautiful lake and a cute town centre with cafes and restaurants, my favorite part of the town was the lake as my friends and I liked to hang out on a wharf there after school we would take photos and chat about things. We'd go and get coffees, brioches and pizza from our favorite cafes. Our two favorites being Caffeina and Mama Polina's. I loved the cafes because the coffees and food was so cheap! I remember it being like a euro fifty for a brioche and cappuccino, and being like a euro for an espresso. It was amazing! and also I remember pizza being like five euro. One of the many things I love about Italy is that the food is cheap but so good! One thing I recommend to do with regards to food in Italy don't go where the tourists go, go where the locals go because the food is most likely to be cheaper and better. Italy has some of the best food in the world and no one can disagree with me haha.

- Me in Lecco

On to where I was living the thing I loved the most about where I was living was that it was a thirty minute train ride to Milan. Also the train tickets over there are so cheap! I love Milan, I had some of the best times in Milan! The city is absolutely beautiful and people are so nice! I mainly went to Milan with my exchange student friends, but they were some of the best memories. I remember going for the first time and being wowed by the Duomo and even by the train station. Milan has one of the coolest train stations as it was built during the fascist era. But my friends and I had some of the best memories in Milan, one of my favorite parts of Milan was going to this castle it was like a five minute walk from the Duomo and my friends and I would go and hang in the park that was behind it. The castle was also beautiful and yeah it was our favorite part of Milan to go. We'd just hang in the park and talk for ages. One of my favorite days in Milan was when I went with my girl exchange student friends for the first time, I'd already been but it was so much fun bringing them. We took tons of photos and shopped a bit. One of the funniest memories from that trip was when we went and sat in the park and we found a part where there were a group of guys playing football, and so we decided to stay and watch them. It was one of the funniest things I had ever experienced! Remembering this day makes me miss these girls. One of my other favorite memories of Milan was when my best friend from France and I went to Milan together just us two, and we went shopping, and it was raining. Sounds simple but it was one of my favorite days of being in Milan!

Besides being in Milan I also got to go and explore other places such as Rome, I went to Rome for my first week of exchange and had orientation. I had already been staying there with my family because we did a trip around Italy before my exchange which was amazing! Anyway I love Rome. For Rome I recommend going for at least five days because there's so much to explore in Rome, like you need a full day both at the Vatican and in the Ancient part. I enjoyed the ancient part of Rome the most as I got to see the Colosseum, also I had studied ancient Rome in school so it was more meaningful and rewarding to see it all in real life. The vatican is also incredible, you need at least a few hours to see the museum as there's so much to see! and Sistine Chapel was beautiful. But I preferred seeing the ancient stuff. It's crazy for me as a Kiwi to think the stuff I saw in Rome is older than my own country!

Another place I visited was with my family was Venice, Venice was beautiful! I recommend going in the winter because it's less busy, it was busy anyway but there's less people around. I loved going to St Marco's square and seeing the Pointe Di Rialto bridge, and I just loved walking around the little streets and had some of the best gelato there! I also went to Florence and Pisa which were both beautiful! I went to Florence with a group of exchange students and was so much fun! Even though Pisa is famous for the tower, I thought the city was really cute! So I recommend exploring the cute little city of Pisa. Going to Florence and Pisa, has made me want to go and explore the tuscan region because it's so beautiful, full of vineyards and hills it's beautiful!

- My friends and I in Milan!

One of my favorite places I got to explore was Como, which is the city on the other side of the lake from where I was living. I just found it was extremely cute and had a good vibe to it! To my exchange friends that got to live there I'm extremely jealous of you haha. Como also has one of the best gelato shops, right on the edge of the lake. It often has cues outside because it's that good! Also the cathedral is beautiful! Even though Como is a small city I recommend exploring there!

Anyway enough talking about the amazing places I went to, I'll talk about my exchange. So I struggled with a few things as most exchange students would. The main thing I struggled with was learning the language, because you have to learn the language as Italians don't tend to speak very good English. So I struggled with learning it, which was annoying because whenever I'd try to have conversations with people I couldn't understand them. However I eventually did start to understand and speak the language more, and I can say that I understand more than I can speak. However, being back in New Zealand I've been trying to keep it up as I don't want to loose it and should improve on it.

I struggled a little bit with homesickness but not too much as I had been to boarding school previously so I was used to being away from home. But I think because I had a good group of friends and family around me it made it easier being away from home and Italy slowly became like my second home!

The schooling system was very different for me. Because in Italian high school they have separate schools for different subjects therefore they have to choose what they want to do for a career in middle school. Such as they have schools for science, sports, art, classics, all sorts! I went to a human science school therefore I was doing psychology, philosophy, history etc. The schools are also not exactly the nicest looking buildings as in they look like prisons, they have bars on their windows and the buildings look like they aren't taken care of well. Also their toilets are practically just holes in the ground so it was quite interesting. I'm definitely glad I did my schooling in New Zealand. Since I had already graduated from high school when I was in Italy, I didn't have to do any work and also the teachers didn't really pay attention to the exchange students as they were more focussed on their own students therefore school was very boring for me. However I managed to make friends with students in my class such as I became good friends with a girl who spoke really good english because she went to the US for a year. But my classmates were all really sweet, as on my birthday they surprised me with a cake and card (which I still have) which was so cute and sweet for them to do. But yeah the school was one of the major culture shock moments for me!

Like I said I made some of my best friends while I was in Italy, with the majority of them being exchange students but I didn't mind because it was easier to make friends with each other because we were experiencing the same thing. The exchange students who I became close friends with was towards the end of my exchange, however I did make friends with the exchange students that were with me from the beginning of my exchange such as I became close with a girl from Australia who lived in the same town as me, and with another Australian girl who lived in Milan. I became friends with people from all around the globe and they are connections I'll keep for life! I also became friends with Italians such as with a couple of my classmates and I became good friends with two girls that I met at another orientation I went to which was for Italian students who were going on exchanges to our countries and I was able to speak about New Zealand, and these two girls were going to New Zealand and that's how I became friends with them. In June I went up to where they live which is north of Milan and near the Swiss boarder it was beautiful where they lived. But yeah I had the best weekend getting to stay with them, we also went on a hike to a village in the hills which was towards the French boarder, and it was amazing!

Anyway living in Italy was one of the best experiences of my life and if anyone is thinking about going on exchange reading this I 100% recommend it because it will be an experience you'll never forget!

Thank you for reading! If you have any questions about exchange or Italy comment them below as I plan on doing a separate post about exchange xx