Guiding Principle #3: 
We believe that multiple host family stays enhance life skills, development and global citizenship.

I really enjoyed my IFYE summer Ambassador exchange to Italy.  My first host family lived and maintained a rural farm in the Valdichiana Valley about a half hour from Arezzo or a little over two hours north of Rome.  Our farm included crops, a vineyard, pigs and some sheep and cows for milking and for cheesemaking.  Actually, it seemed they had their hand in a little bit of everything.  It’s not surprising to learn that after 30 years, they’ve turned their idyllic homestead into an “Agriturismo,” which is a working farm-stay retreat, sort of like an Italian B&B in the countryside. True to the nature of many Italian families, we lived together in a multi-generational household – one grandfather, two sons (one married at the time), one daughter, one daughter-in-law and the grandchildren, a boy and a girl.

We usually would eat our evening meal together – myself included equaled eight at the dinner table. That was many more people than I was used to eating with at mealtimes in the States, but it made for lively conversations and lots of laughter. I often would need help from a family member with cutting the hard rind off my Pecorino cheese course or removing fruit peels from the peaches or plums that were served after dinner as well. Somebody was always generous to help me out with the knife skills or laugh at my attempts to explain in broken Italian what I had done that day. Sometimes my words would come out wrong or slightly mispronounced, but hand gestures could usually speak just as well as an incorrectly accented word.

In the summertime, my host mother’s mother, the grandmother (or “la nonna” as we called her), would come to visit from far away for a few weeks at a time and then the ladies of the household would go into bread and pasta-making production.  They used an outside summer kitchen with a wood-fired oven, sort of like the pizza-making ovens we are familiar with today. The dough was made without yeast so that it wouldn’t rise but it still needed to be measured and cut into portions, then rolled out through a pressing machine and made into circular discs like a pizza shell. The Sardinian-style flatbread would puff up in the oven, get toasty and then the air holes would lose their steam when removed from the oven. My youngest host sister was about three years old at the time of my stay and she would come into the kitchen to play in the flour, being a little too young to really help in the actual making of bread, but nonetheless welcomed as part of the cross-generational experience.  La nonna is still making bread today, well into her 90’s!

(Above) Enjoying an evening meal