I have just returned from the town of Lodi, not far from Milan, which hosted the Italian CICERO competition on Saturday 29th March at the Istituto Sperimentale Statale “Maffeo Vegio”.

The competition itself was held in a very prestigious location - the town's beautiful Library, a former monastery which houses some of the most ancient books in Europe. In this selection of photos you can see the Headmaster, several of the school's seven Classics teachers, the teacher in charge of the school's twinning projects and myself with the students. I congratulated the students on their enthusiasm and dedication and presented their school with a framed picture of my own school, Malvern St James. I then gave them all a souvenir pencil and ceremonially opened the question-papers to start the competition. The final two photos show the second part of the competition.







The competition had to be held earlier than in the UK because many of the students involved will be on a trip to Ireland at that time, so they joined France, where there were competitions in Paris and Strasbourg during the afternoon. Both the French and the Italian centres will be in touch with us, Spain and Andorra by video-conferencing on Friday 18th April.

It was a wonderful experience for me to meet Classics enthusiasts in Italy and to see how they inspire their students, who are a delightful group of young people. It is also very exciting to see how the CICERO competition is gaining momentum in different countries and to know that it is raising the profile of Classics internationally. Patrick Voisin, the Director of the project, and whose idea it was, deserves to feel very proud of his achievement and I consider it a great privilege to have been involved from the start and to have contributed to its success by creating the multi-lingual website. (particularly since the RSI it caused in my right wrist has more or less gone now!)

Entries for the UK competition are still coming in, but as far as I know we shall be able to use the same room as last year; we do however have contingency plans to move to the main school hall if necessary.

Anne Dicks

classics@malvernstjames.co.uk
anne@pyrrha.me.uk
Pyrrha's Roman Pages http://www.pyrrha.me.uk
CICERO Latin competition http://www.ciceroeuropa.eu
Suki's own website http://www.pyrrha.demon.co.uk/suki.html