How to Italy

Contacting Us

2012-01-17T19:02:08+01:00

If you want to touch base via mail, you'll currently get me on emma_s_bird@yahoo.co.uk. Alternatively you can follow me on Twitter @secretsardinia

Mario's currently dealing with the business side, be that starting a business, expanding a business or needing business advice. He's also damn good at writing emails and letters that get results so if your Italian skills aren't up to the job, he's the man for you. Mario's email address is: mario.berri@studi-professionali.it.

Update on Mario

2012-01-10T15:04:09+01:00

While I've been taking a backseat on the blogging front, Mario's been writing away. If you want to follow his Italian blog, then click here.

You can also follow him on Twitter @marioberri where he tweets in both English and Italian.

Happy New Year

2012-01-03T19:19:05+01:00

I think I’ll stop making rash promises because that last post was premature. Two years and three months premature to be precise. At the time, I really thought, no, scratch that, hoped, that I was up to writing again but looking back, I was still floundering, my pockets weighted down by stones of grief and bewilderment.

My memories of 2009 are hazy. One minute I was gulping down too-hot espresso that scorched the back of my throat while mentally running through a lesson plan and checking in the mirror for any stray wrinkles that had crept up overnight; the next, tears and snot were streaming down my face, and I was puking up baked-beans on toast (you can take the girl out of England...) on Mario and his new pinstripe suit as I listened to my mum telling me my brother had killed himself. I never really believed that life could shatter into a million, tiny pieces. But, as I found out at 8.23am on March 31^st, 2009, it can. And it did.

How I got through the rest of 2009, I’m not too sure. For an ex-fashion and textile journalist, my wardrobe was appallingly uncoordinated. I just pulled on the first thing I picked up, ironed or not, washed or not, and didn’t bother to look in the mirror because I know I wouldn’t recognise the sad, bereft woman who stared back at me, her exhaustion accentuated by the huge, dark circles under her eyes and the bald patches where her hair had fallen out in clumps from the stress.

2010 carried on in much the same way, with me wobbling off to school in my mismatched clothes and students, parents and teachers doing their best to look after me. The caretakers at the state schools I was working in would cook nutritious food and make sure we had lunch together; parents would press homemade bread and biscuits into my hands, and students were unquestionably well-behaved, sensing that all of my energy was going into to teaching them. Once, when my teenagers begged to be allowed to sing a song in class and then chose Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds – the very same song we’d had playing in church at Matt’s funeral – I surreptitiously wiped back my tears and joined in. By the end of the year, I decided that I needed answers to the questions that would torment me as I shut my eyes and tried to sleep. Was I to blame? What could I have done to prevent my brother from ending his life? But the question that tormented me most was why.

So I phoned the coroner, wrote letters and requested a copy of his report. The envelope came in the post and Mario and my friends made me promise I wouldn’t open it until one of them was with me. The problem was that the equation which ended up being my brother’s life was in that envelope and just as my nan never wanted to be without my grandad’s ashes, I suddenly had a real attachment to the coroner’s report. I slipped it into my schoolbag and vowed I wouldn’t read it until I got home that evening. Except, I reasoned with myself, it wouldn’t hurt to open the white A4 envelope and check it really was the report, would it? And then, a couple of hours later, as I ran my fingers across the inch-thick documentation, I decided it would be a good idea to check that the coroner really had sent the information about my brother and not someone else’s. With a beating heart and quickened breath, I peered in. It was definitely about my brother because his name was on the letter the coroner had written to me. And so, feeling brave, I dared myself to look at the front page of the report and then wish I hadn’t. As much as I already knew the bare facts, seeing ‘death by hanging’ staring back at me in black joined-up handwriting was too much to handle.

When I got home that night, we opened a bottle of red wine, toasted my brother and then I handed the report to Mario. For two hours we didn’t speak. He sat on the sofa and began reading what was essentially a review of my brother’s decision to tie that noose around his neck and tears silently rolled down his face. And, for two hours, I sat on the other sofa watching him, with tears silently rolling down mine. But, as I painfully discovered, knowing why was no help at all.

2011 was the year of change. The second anniversary of my brother’s suicide coincided with me starting a teaching contract at the university (an ambition of mine since I started teaching nine years ago) in Olbia. I slowly felt myself edging forward into life again only to be set back when one of my favourite students hanged himself on Good Friday for the same reason as my brother. At first I was incredibly angry with him but it slowly dawned on me that I couldn’t have prevented his death anymore than I could have prevented my brother’s and, as difficult as it was seeing that empty chair in class, I knew that a part of my grief had gone.

May played a triple whammy. Mario was in hospital for complications linked to his radiotherapy eleven years earlier and I was shuttling backwards and forwards to the hospital, which was an hour away in Sassari. At the same time as Mario was being operated on, my nan was diagnosed with cancer and the next day I found a lump in my breast. It suddenly brought me back to the here and now. When my nan died less than a month after the original diagnosis and the morning after I’d flown back to England to visit her, I drew back her curtains in her living room which had become a makeshift bedroom, listened to the birdsong and smiled at eighty-six years of life well-lived.

As for me, the radiologist at the European Institute of Oncology in Milan did an ultrasound and found several lumps the day before I was due to fly back to England for my summer holiday. Going private in the UK was out of the question because the costs were prohibitive and now that I’m Italian resident I’m no longer eligible on the NHS but I knew I had to be proactive and remain positive. I changed my diet, upped the exercise routine, retreated to a rented cottage in Devon and took my nan’s dog, who by now had been adopted my parents, for plenty of walks at the beach. By the time I flew back to Sardinia at the end of August, I felt ready to take on the world.

Two biopsies, several packs of ice and lots of shopping trips (I wasn’t going to let the opportunity to splash the cash on gorgeous accessories go to waste - sometime in 2011 I rediscovered the restorative power of high heels and Chanel lipgloss) to Milan later, the lumps turned out to be benign but they were still growing so the IEO referred me to the Humanitas Cancer Centre and on December 1 I was in my room, giggling away late into the night with my roommate Francesca, who was in for reconstructive surgery after a mastectomy, and not feeling at all nervous. Not that I had reason to. It was a very minor operation, I was awake throughout, and I was only kept in overnight because I'd flown in from Sardinia. Plus, when you have a surgeon who’s examining you intently with the words ‘I’m the best. I don’t intend to fuck this up’, you know you’ve hit hospital gold. You know you’ve hit double gold when the nurse who’s responsible for changing your dressings back in Olbia declares the stitching to be a ‘masterpiece’. And, when you look in the mirror after exactly a month (i,e, this morning) and can’t even tell where you were sewn back together, you know you’ve hit the hospital jackpot.

That’s the personal front. On the career front, I’m teaching four courses at the university, I’m an Area Rep for HSP, preparing high school students for exchange years abroad and looking after the incoming students, and I’ve got the work-life balance finally sussed. My thirty-fifth birthday last month was another turning point. I’m the same age now as my brother was when he died and, although he’ll always be my big brother, he’s now firmly a part of my past.

I was always one for five-year career and personal plans, ambitious as hell and ruthless in my quest to get there. 2009, 2010 and 2011 were nothing like I thought they were going to be, thus proving that there are some things that can never be fitted into an Excel spreadsheet, vision boards or written goals, no matter what the experts claim. But that’s the thing with your life splintering into millions of shards. You can’t glue it back together or expect it to be the same because it won’t ever be that. But you can take solace from the fact that having hit rock bottom, the only way is up.

So here’s a toast to 2012 and the Year of the Bird as coined by my friend Simon Winn, a journalist-turned vicar who was my very first mentor when I set my heart on journalism 20 years ago. But also to my younger brother, M and my best friends who got me through the toughest of years. And to Sardinia for its healing powers. Because without any of them, I would still be in a very confusing place, weighed down by grief and still wondering how and when to start writing again.

Buon Anno!

I'm back

2009-10-02T08:58:56+02:00

This week writer Catherine Sanderson, aka her of Petite Anglaise fame, hit the headlines once again when she announced undramatically/dramatically (undramatically if you're like the status quo, dramatically if you're a journalist having a very slow news day) that she'd decided to quit blogging about her expat life in Paris.

And that was only after a month's absence from the blogosphere and prompts from one concerned reader.

It made me realise that I've never explained my sudden disappearance both Twitter and blogging and why I've ignored hundreds of unopened emails (yes, I'm sorry about those) at the beginning of April.

It was only meant to be for a few days. But those limped into weeks and months with only my closest friends and a few concerned fellow bloggers/Twitterers knowing the reason why I'd lost my writing mojo. Suddenly, six months had passed and I hadn't so much as lifted a finger to the keyboard to reveal why.

So now I am.

My brother ended his life at the end of March and when you're dealing with a bereavement that you never ever expected to have to deal with, the online world becomes very trivial indeed. How could I have enjoyed carefree banter with fellow Tweeters or give advice about living in Italy when all my energy was spent on getting up in the morning and struggling through the day?

I'm taking babysteps back into the web 2.0. You can find me on Facebook and I'm vowing to be back on Twitter soon. I've also got a few blog posts up my sleeve about what Italy's taught me over the past few months and I'll be publishing those in the next few weeks.

Please bear with me.

Teaching in Sardinia

2009-03-02T11:46:05+01:00

The Speak English School still has a part-time teaching opportunity from now until July.

We're a small but bustling language schoo in Arzachena, and pride ourselves on being dynamic and innovative. The social side is big with us, too, and we hold monthly Speak English pizza nights.

If you'd love to join our team of teachers, here's what you need to do:

Be a native English speaker

Have EU citizenship/working papers in place

Be CELTA/Trinity-qualified

Have a passion for teaching

Speak at least some Italian

Tell us why you are the best teacher out there for the job

Give us an example of your passion and initiative

And here's not what to do:

Don't send us a general application that you're sending to a million different places

Don't send us an application full of grammar and spelling mistakes

Don't apply if you don't meet the above criteria

Don't mention in your application form that you've always wanted to live in Rome/Florence/Venice. We're in Sardinia.

Don't attach a general business CV. We're an English school not a corporation. It's the teaching experience we're interested in first and foremost.

Don't send us an email asking for more information about Sardinia. If you want the job, you do the homework.

Send your application (including CV) to emmaDOTbirdAThowtoitalyDOTcom

Teaching opportunities in Sardinia

2008-11-14T10:40:03+01:00

Do you want to teach English in one of the world's most beautiful locations?
Do you want to slow down and relax and learn a whole new way of living?
Do you want to teach in my school?

I'm looking for qualified teachers and non-qualfied native speakers to work in the Gallura area of Sardinia. If you're interested, email me your cv and covering letter, outlining why you're the best person for the job. Please note, due to EU laws, only those with EU passports may apply.

Email: Info at howtoitaly dot com

All will be revealed soon

2008-11-14T10:31:40+01:00

It's been another busy few weeks here.

Big things are happening on the work/business front. And I'll be revealing all soon.

As for the new pad, it's almost ready. Almost. As in it's officially ours but we're still waiting for electricity and gas to be connected. The kitchen still needs to be installed. We still need a bed and a matress to sleep on. And we still need light fittings. It may not sound much, but I'm in Sardinia where time works in an entirely different way to the rest of Europe. If I get any of the above by Christmas, it will be cause for celebration.

In the meantime, a belated thanks to Megan Fitzgerald, over at career by choice, for the coffee beans she sent me in the post. I still can't believe I was one of the winners in the 'you know you're in Italy when...' contest.

A presto (promise!)

Revealed: my students on the Sardegna Speaks English course

2008-10-29T09:56:31+01:00

10 of my 14 students on one of our pizza nights.

These are the words that caught me off-guard last week in the restaurant (note, I'm leaving them in Italian):

“Emma, oltre che un’ottima insegnante d’inglese, sei veramente una bellissima persona. Averti conosciuto è stato molto bello, di te ho apprezzato il fatto che sai rendere le lezioni divertenti e piacevoli. Le tue lezioni già mi mancano e mi consola il fatto di sapere che, anche se non con tutto il gruppo, comunque proseguiranno. Grazie davvero di tutto.” - Giuliana Peddis

“Ognuno di noi ha diverse capacità di apprendimento, differenti basi di partenza…ma stessi obbiettivi! Imparare!!!!! Questa è una scuola dinamica di importante rapporto umano. L’approccio con essa è un’eccellente combinazione di capacità organizzative. Emma, l’insegnante, è attenta alle esigenze di ciascuno. Sono soddisfatta della sue costante dedizione. Questo è determinante per la crescita dello studente. Lei rispetta i tuoi impegni…ma…seguendo i tuoi progressi. Imparare con Emma è facile. Possiede gli strumenti giusti. Ti guida verso l’importante obbiettivo…imparare l’inglese” - Maddalena Demuro

“Onorati di averti conosciuta!” - Francesco Giorgioni e Maria Franca Linaldeddu

“Cara Emma, ti ringrazio per tutto quello che mi hai insegnato e che mi insegnerai. Sei una persona speciale, anzi unica, la tua spontaneità e la tua allegria sono contagiose. Insomma, non so se l’hai capito ma per me questo corso è stato un’esperienza meravigliosa.” - Maria Antonietta Tonola

“Sono felice di averti conosciuta. Grazie” - Adriana Chiodino

“Grazie di tutto quello che hai saputo darci! E’ stata una bella esperienza e non avrei mai pensato di riuscire a impare una nuova lingua. Siamo divertiti!” - Maria Meloni

“Emma, sei una teacher proprio speciale per me, anzi unica - non ne ho mai avuto un’altra. Grazie per la pazienza.” - Maria Bonanno

“Cara professoressa, sei stata bravissima, ma nel mio caso il tuo sforzo è stato quasi vano (per colpa mia). Comunque, ciò che ricordo meglio è nice to meet you.” - Matteo Filigheddu

“Rientrare a scuola e riprendere i libri in mano è stato un’esperienza davvero bella, anche perché mi sono trovata molto bene con te e con il tuo insegnamento. Ti ringrazio. Ci vediamo presto alle nuove lezioni.” - Elisabetta Scampuddu

From journalism to teaching and why I don't regret it

2008-10-24T09:23:32+02:00

Ever get those days where you wonder whether or not you did the right thing in giving up one career you loved (journalism) for something even less well paid (teaching) hundreds of kilometres away (Milan's urban jungle to Sardinia's sandy beaches)?

Five-and-half years later and all those doubts have vanished. Let's face it, teaching English on a mega yacht moored off the Costa Smeralda or travelling to work via helicopter to teach world famous peeps (my lips are sealed - I signed a confidentiality clause yesterday) is far better than being glued to a computer screen. Oh, and I've also realised teaching is far more lucrative than being a trainee reporter. You've just got to get the right contacts.

Of course, that's the extreme version of my life. The cliche-ridden one, where I pinch myself to see whether I'm dreaming. But even the more mundane end of teaching is rewarding. On June 15, I walked into a classroom to teach 14 total beginners 80 hours of English. I was nervous. I'd never taught a group of total beginners before and I wasn't quite sure how it was going to go. Three-hour lessons three times a week can be painful. It's a good job I came armed with my bright pink basketball to break the ice.

Four months of laughter, frustration and me bollocking them for not doing their homework later and we've finished. I'm sad and I know they are, too. What we created in those 80 hours wasn't perfunctory. It went far beyond the language learning. It was proof that when you put your heart and soul into something, magic happens.

Last night we had the end-of-course pizza, together with the awards ceremony. But the joke was on me. What I hadn't realised is that they'd got together to buy me a beautiful, beautiful leather bag, inside which was a book filled with their handwritten sentiments. It's a good job I didn't read it in the restaurant. Mascara sliding down your face isn't good publicity for a school.

So here's to Giuliana, Antonietta, Maria B, Giulia, Laura, Katia, Matteo, Iana, Maddalena, Francesco, Maria L, Valeria, Maria M and Elisabetta for being the best group of students ever.

Cheers!

Why Marmite is my secret weapon in the Italian classroom

2008-10-23T02:00:00+02:00

Marmite is a regular in my classroom.

It's the most effective weapon there is in keeping everyone - from lively kids to gossiping adults - disciplined.

Because they know that whenever the noise rises to an unacceptable level or they're not focusing on the English task in hand, I take the Marmite out of my bag (dubbed the Mary Poppins bag because no one is ever quite sure what's going to emerge next), place it on my desk and unscrew the top.

The effect is instant silence without me having to say anything. And that's not because I put the fear of God into them (though my CELTA teachers might disagree - I was once nicknamed Sergeant Emma or some other Army-esque term. But, hey, that was six years ago). It's because the brownstuff puts the fear of God into them.

They know that if they choose to snog their classmates (yes, that really has happened), apply their lippy or continue to gossip in Italian, I'll place the open jar of Marmite on their desks.

C, who has regularly been on the receiving end of the M-treatment, even begged me to give her some so she could use the same technique at home when her six-year-old twin boys misbehaved.

Is this a sign that Italians are finally beginning to appreciate the salty brown gloop?