Denmark »

The dream

Apr 132012

At the beginning of the Seventies, I began to give French and Italian lessons to small groups of students in private schools – International School of Languages, Holmes Language School, Berlitz Language school in Melbourne. I would have liked to have had a deeper, more academic knowledge of these languages but what I did have was, in any case, more than adequate for my courses.

A few years later, with some financial help from a friend, and sticking to my principle, if other people can be successful why shouldn’t I be ?, I opened a language school: European School of Languages, in the centre of the town where I was living. I would never have expected it to be such an amazing success; it was incredible. In the space of a few years about twenty-five part-time mother-tongue teachers were teaching at the European School of Languages and all the classrooms were constantly in use. Fantastic!

The leap

Brief autobiography No Responses »

Mar 132012

When I was sixteen, resolute in the face of my mother’s objections, I went away, leaving my family, my animals, the place where I was born, and I set off for northern Italy.

In Turin I slept in cold, dark, wretched garages, with snow on the roof and water dripping inside. Sometimes I lived in dilapidated, filthy houses where there was no toilet, no drinking water, nothing at all, only a dirty mattress on the floor where you slept in your clothes beside strangers. Most of the time I worked on building sites.

My first love story, with a girl from Reggio Emilia, ended painfully. She was semiliterate and so was I: we had no future. And I wanted to go back to school, I wanted to study.

In spite of the industrial atmosphere of the city and the tough life I led there I liked Turin: it opened my eyes, awoke in me a taste for life and for a world that I was impatient to discover.