Maria Rocca: Senior Maria Rocca will participate in the Rotary Youth Exchange in Italy next year

After senior Maria Rocca finishes getting ready for school, she sits down and pulls out a small notebook — home to lists of Italian verbs and phrases — and quizzes herself on them. She’s determined to become fluent.

“Arrivederci, ciao, addio!”

“I try to drill [Italian] in my head so I think about it throughout the day,” Rocca said. “Then, when I’m talking to someone, I’ll just be like, ‘Now, how will I say that in Italian?’” 

Rocca will join other international students participating in the Rotary Youth Exchange, a program where students learn a new language and attend an Italian high school in Brescia while on the path to becoming global citizens. 

Next year, with the Rotary Youth Exchange, Rocca will live close to Brescia, Italy for 10 months as she studies at a local high school. In the meantime, she’s learning Italian to prepare for trips with host families and interactions with exchange students.

“I’m really excited to meet all the other exchange students because they’re going through similar things with homesickness and all of that,” Rocca said. “So it’ll be nice to have that connection with those people.”

Rocca chose the Italian exchange program because her extended family immigrated from Italy to the United States in the early 1900s. She’s also interested in architecture, specifically churches, and hopes to attend services when she’s there.

Senior Martina Bernardi currently participates in the Rotary Youth Exchange, studying in the United States at East rather than her home high school in Cremona, Italy — she’ll return back to Cremona on May 25.

“I realized leaving home, how much I love my country,” Bernardi said. “[Maria’s] gonna learn so much. Whenever I hear about an exchange student that’s coming to my country, I get so excited.”

Although Rocca hasn’t taken any official Italian language classes, she’ll be armed with a Duolingo streak and her notebook of Italian verbs and phrases for her year abroad. 

“We all have these different backgrounds, but we all come here to speak Italian,” Rocca said. “There could be someone from Portugal, and they only speak Portuguese and Italian, and I speak English and Italian, so we get to speak our second language with each other.”