Have you found your Italy yet? Retreat highlights

Recalling the Magic: An Immersive Journey into Italian Language and Culture in my hometown.

On this rainy and stormy day here in Cremona, I really feel the need to go with my mind back to warmer temperatures and a summer holiday feeling.

So here’s the rundown of how the Italian language immersion retreat that I hosted in September went

Grab a beverage and a cat to snuggle with in your favorite corner of the house and andiamo.

And if the idea of an Italian immersion experience feels like just what you need, you can join the Retreat 2024 waiting list here.

Relaxing in Italian

Every retreat is different. The town may be the same, the activities are tweaked but how the participants react to them and to the people they meet, well, that is something magical that changes from time to time.

Take the art therapy class with Marta. I wasn’t sure I was going to schedule it because I wanted to first meet the group in person.

The idea with the class is to create a relaxing moment IN Italian while soaking in the views.

You start sketching, you move on to watercolor with Marta’s gentle guidance and you relax completely. There’s music playing in the background. At first, you’re a bit tense and then, everything is washed away and you’re completely in the moment.

What are the benefits?

• You create positive associations with the language

• There’s bonding with fellow learners during the class

• You make memories and connections by crafting your very own memento of Gaeta.

When you create positive associations, you’re also building new neural pathways in the brain for more (and better) Italian.

That’s such a vital process because otherwise, Italian is locked up in the study part of the brain and doesn’t have a chance to expand and become a complete part of who you are.

Anyway, when I met this year’s participants, I had no doubt, they were perfect for Marta’s class.

The goal isn’t to know how to draw well but to create a moment, in Italian, to connect with the world around you and with yourself.

At the end of the two hours, we felt wonderful and totally immersed in Italian. People would pass by and stop to chat with us.

Marta goes around giving tips and gentle guidance, the sketching forces you to pay attention to everything. It’s one of those things that you have to be there to fully understand the power of.

Marta ( she’s so lovely!) asked each participant to write a sentence to capture their feelings after the two hours. The sentences were so beautiful.

"Gaeta, una cittadina bellissima dove c'è il tempo per assorbire la cultura, la tranquillità, e le viste ma anche un posto per fare amiche nuove."

“In solo cinque giorni mi sono innamorata di Gaeta. La cultura, il cibo, le persone, i colori, tutto."

Nalini got more creative and wrote a beautiful language mix.

“Painting on the beach mentre listening to music in Gaeta! C'è paradiso!"

And finally,

Ho trovato Italia a Gaeta.

I too wrote a sentence and I’ll share it at the end of this post.

Looking for Italy everywhere

Ho trovato Italia a Gaeta.

This beautiful sentence that Cecilia wrote sums up perfectly what I’m trying to create with my retreats.

Cecilia, like many of you reading this post, is a heritage learner. Her family is originally from Italy, they then moved to Argentina.

I meet many learners from Argentina with similar stories. It’s not always simple to trace back family.  

Connecting again with your roots, identity and sense of belonging can be hard at so many levels. Not least an emotional one.

That’s why, when I read Cecilia’s sentence, I felt relief that I’d been able to help in some way.

There’s nothing worse than doing the work of connecting again with your family’s country only to feel like an outsider. I would know. My father was from the US and I was born there but I couldn’t feel more foreign and distant despite having family in Georgia and California. It leaves me feeling a bit disconnected. Like there’s a tiny wound in me that has been left festering.

When deciding to nurture your Italian connections, make sure you pick the right destinations where you can truly hope to find yourself and your relationship with the country.

Small communities with a slower pace of life, like Gaeta undoubtedly is, can make a big difference and help shape the quest for your identity and legacy.  What also helps, is not running a marathon through the country.

Give yourself time to spend in a town, create tiny habits, be open to making connections.

The journey towards connecting to your Italian legacy is an important one.

Honor it by engaging with the country thoughtfully. Consider that what you’re doing, doesn’t just benefit you but also the people you inspire along the way and ultimately, the country.

Small actions make waves. Don’t downplay the impact what you’re doing has on the world around you.

A first time for everything.

Retreats aren’t only about the five days we spend together. It’s about the actions they trigger and the inspiration that comes with it.

Some participants study very intensely for the whole period preceding the Retreat.

Others make incredible discoveries about themselves during the five days.

Others still, allow the Retreat to bring in change in other areas of their lives.

Because deciding to go to a small town for five days with complete strangers is a bold action to take, other brave steps follow. I’m thinking of Nalini, who went from Greece, Naples and then to Gaeta on her own, traveling solo for the first time.  

Or how she discovered and fell hopelessly in love with babà ! And couldn’t do without it again. I totally understand her because babàs are a truly incredible pastry.

Another first time was a yoga class we held on the last day.

One of the Retreat participants, Tara, is a certified yoga instructor. So, I asked her if she felt up to hosting a brief class for us on the beach.

This is something I totally admire in Tara. Hosting a class of anything, let alone yoga,  in another language is HARD. But she took it in stride and did her best to deliver instructions in Italian to us. It was a great class and we were all inspired by her bravery.

We’d hoped to have the beach all to ourselves for the class but unfortunately, it was the warmest end of September in ages and people just kept flocking in droves to the beach that day. It felt like summer. But we found a little corner and had a great experience.

Sometimes, when things don’t go as you hoped for, it’s even better!

A trip to the market

Usually, on market day, we end up spending more time at the frutta e verdura market than at the clothes one.

This time, because every group has different dynamics, we got completely lost at the clothes market and everyone wanted to spend even more time there looking at the bancarelle and buying clothes and bargains.

It was such fun to see everyone picking and taking in the experience of buying clothes. It’s such a unique moment to live in a small town and I’m happy that il gruppo soaked in every minute of it. Fun and different situations are another way of immersing in the language and culture of a place.

After that, we shared our findings and then I split the group in two to buy food for our lunch that we prepared together.

I love sending participants to buy local ingredients in town either at the market or at the shops because small language adventures are inevitable and bonds are immediately made with the community because, in Gaeta, every shopkeeper has opinions and suggestions on what you should and should not be eating.

Let’s put it this way. When you go into a food store in a small town, you know when you’re walking in but you don’t know when you’ll finish because you might get caught up in a lengthy food conversation.

In barca con Dario.

Dario started offering boat tours to tourists back in 1990 when unbelievably, nobody else was doing it. Flash forward to today, I can’t imagine hosting a retreat without a tour on his tiny boat. He and his dog, Bo, are such gracious hosts and the giro in barca is always a breathtaking moment

I don’t talk about this enough but so many ancient legends are set here in Gaeta. After all, we’re within stone's throw of Il Circeo where Circe, the Greek goddess who transformed men into pigs, lived.

Legend has it that the Nave di Serapo, the incredible boat-shaped-rock in the sea in Gaeta, is one of Ulysses' ships transformed in stone by the sorceress.

Not to mention all the views of where the pirates used to hold ships in ambush and the views of all the ancient Roman villas.

That day, in Dario’s boat, the sea was lovely. That feeling of past and present mingling together and speaking to us directly under the September sun made the atmosphere even more magical.

Dario stopped the boat and suggested we take a dive and it was incredible. Swimming in the same sea as other figures of legend, added a layer of magic to everything.

Dario told me he is retiring. But because I can’t imagine a retreat without him, he said he and Bo will do their best to be there on my next retreats in 2024.

And I’ll just stop here because I really want to publish this post as soon as possible.

But I could just keep on sharing because telling stories and inspiring retreat moments is something that lights me up.

I’ll try to post about some of the other fun moments on Instagram where you can find me.

In the meantime, if the idea of joining an Italian language immersion in 2024 sounds tempting, you can join the retreat waiting list here.

Especially because in 2024 I’m hosting a new retreat in beautiful Cremona.

What I wrote.

At the art therapy class with Marta, remember I mentioned that we all had to write one sentence next to our watercolor? Well, I wrote “ Questo è quello che voglio”- This is what I want.

And it is.

I want to get more people to connect with each other and with Italy, especially small-town Italy.

I want to keep on creating wonderful inspiring language learning experiences for Italy lovers who can finally improve Italian while getting to know the Italy that lies behind all the tourist clichès.

Join the 2024 Retreats waiting list here and get access to all the dates, venues and early-bird offers valid only for the month of November.

---

I’d love to hear from you. Have you ever been on a language immersion retreat in Italy or elsewhere? What was your experience like ? Leave a comment and let’s chat, coffee lover.