Raise your glasses for the Class of 2026 in the Venice Campus

Ladies and gentlemen, raise your glasses.

To the Class of 2026. To the only group of teenagers in recorded history who looked at a two-year International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme and collectively decided it needed to be a full-blown triathlon. To the class that turned the cubicles into a base camp, mid-February into a hostage negotiation, and an air fryer into an “Anything but a Backpack” accessory.

You did it. Somehow. And we love you for it.

To the class that arrived at a community bike ride to Lake Garda and revealed, “to our absolute horror, that a significant portion of this class did not know how to ride a bicycle.” To the students who, in our Head of Diploma Programme –  Miss Sara Casagrande‘s words, gave us “a masterclass in emotional success, because it wasn’t about the pedals; it was about managing that sudden, sheer panic and finding your balance when everything feels completely unstable. You didn’t crash. You kept moving forward.”

To the class that turned the cubicles into something between a study hall and a crime scene, a base camp made of empty coffee cups, crumpled drafts, and abandoned snack wrappers, where, as Mr. Emiliano Cori, Head of School reminded everyone with the kind of straight face only a Head of School can pull off, “teachers had to intervene because, amidst all that rubbish, people were getting a little too affectionate in the corners.” To the “legendary spring romances, born exactly two months before the final exams, and statistically destined to face the harsh reality of long-distance university life by September.” We saw it all. We pretended not to. We’re roasting you about it now.

To the class that took the “Anything but a Backpack” challenge as a personal dare and walked into the DP building balancing their high-level textbooks in trash cans, laundry baskets, pet carriers, and, somehow, a fully functioning air fryer. And to the class that ran their final sprint, as Emiliano put it, “in Boston orthopedic slippers.” We told you to aim for Boston. We did not mean that Boston.

But like every toast worth the glass it’s raised in, the laughter has to make room for something quieter. And with that, the stage is all for the students, six of them, each chosen to stand up and define, in their own words, one of the six dimensions of success that H-FARM International School believes in. What they gave, one after another, wasn’t six separate speeches. It was one story, told in six voices.

It opened, fittingly, with failure. Rocco didn’t pretend otherwise: “My reality check came in the form of our first report card. It came then in the form of a failure. I was not meeting the requirements, not even passing.” From there, he named the reckoning every student in the room recognised: “it is only in these moments of true deliberation we can change ourselves; it is only when faced with the nature of our being that we begin to change,” before turning the spotlight away from himself and onto everyone listening: “Never forget the struggle we have forged ourselves from, and carry on forever as a more resilient soul in the harshness of the world.”

That struggle, it turned out, wore many faces. For Maria Augusta, it began in front of a mirror. “One morning, during October break, I looked in the mirror and something felt wrong. Within hours, I couldn’t move part of my face. I developed facial paralysis. And when I couldn’t smile properly, I couldn’t recognise myself anymore.” When everything is taken away, she said, “your routine, your confidence, even your reflection, you are forced to face the one thing you cannot escape: yourself.” The hardest question wasn’t medical: “Do I stay home? Do I quit? Do I hide? Or do I go back even if it feels uncertain and scary?” She came back. And what carried her back, she said, was not a grand gesture but the smallest one imaginable, friends who “didn’t give long speeches. They just stayed, they listened, and they told me something simple. That I still looked like me. That I was still me. And somehow, that was enough to help me take the next step.”

It fell to Alex to give that weight a name, the one the whole class had carried in silence. “Some mornings carried a weight that had nothing to do with your backpack. You know the ones. You woke and already fell behind.” Borrowing Kierkegaard’s paradox that “life must be lived forwards, but it can only be understood backwards,” he asked his classmates not to demand clarity from this moment, but to trust that the meaning would come, and then handed the night its sharpest line: “Dark implies defeat. Stern implies demand. And what these years asked of us, the pressure, the exhaustion, the moments of real doubt, was not darkness. It was sternness. And stern, it turns out, is exactly what growth feels like from the inside.” His charge was simple: “pick a problem, any problem, and do something about it, because to someone who is hurting, something is everything,” and his definition of legacy, “to leave the people you cross paths with a little more happiness and a little more hope than they had before they met you,” read less like advice than like a description of what the six of them had just done for one another.

If Alex named the weight, Ambra found what makes it bearable: each other. Nine years at H-FARM, growing up in a Chinese household in Italy, she had long felt caught between two worlds. “At first, this made me feel different. But the moment I stepped into Chinese school, I realised that everyone there shared similar experiences. What once made me feel different became something that connected me to others.” H-FARM, she said, works the same way: “Our differences are not what divide us; they are what bring us together.” And so she rewrote language success for everyone in the room: “It is not measured by perfect grammar, flawless pronunciation, or fluency alone. When I think about language success, I think about connection. I think about understanding. And most importantly, I think about having the courage to speak at all.”

That connection, the quiet, deliberate kind, is exactly where Maya found her own definition of success. She arrived at H-FARM three years ago “cautious, guarded, and expecting distance,” shaped by experiences of bullying that had followed her into every new space. What changed her wasn’t an event but a pattern: “On our first night in boarding, we all gathered on top of the hill, talking for hours with people we had only just met. There was openness without pressure, inclusion without judgment.” That consistency rebuilt the one thing she’d been missing, trust, and reshaped what she thought success even was: “Social success is not about popularity or visibility. It is the ability to create environments where others feel comfortable enough to be themselves. Not simply finding your own place, but helping others find theirs.”

And nobody carried that idea further than Lorenzo, who closed the circle by naming, one by one, the people who had made him feel at home. He began with a sentence most of the room had never heard him say aloud: “I have a tattoo on my belly, a date. 14/08/2023. That day, I got surgery for cancer, and less than a month later, I moved here.” H-FARM didn’t just mark a new beginning for him. It became one. “We changed a lot and grew together, students and teachers.” What followed was a roll call of gratitude he refused to shorten: the teachers who were “not only the ones inputting the knowledge we will carry for our entire life, but also our friends, our second family, and the biggest, loudest, most beautiful supporters we could have ever asked for;” the boarding parents who, “by always, and I mean always, staying there for us,” became family; Antonella, “one of the cleaning ladies almost always considered invisible, who instead was always there, always cheering for us from the most silent seat;” the campus itself, “which, with its jaw-dropping sunsets, proved to us that endings, like this one, can also be beautiful.” And then the line the whole room quietly took as its own: “The H of H-FARM stands for HUMANS. And your most valuable asset, apart from your knowledge, are exactly the people around you.”

No graduation is ever only about the students. It is also about the families who trusted us with their children, the teachers who became second families, the boarding parents, the staff, the entire community Lorenzo refused to let go unnamed. And it is about the friend who handed over a spare pen thirty seconds before the exam started.

In a few months, this class will scatter, into universities and gap years, into new cities and new languages, into lives we can only begin to imagine from here. But whatever they go on to study, and wherever they go on to do it, they leave already carrying the thing this school cared about most.

As our CEO Antonello Barbaro told them earlier that evening: “You are now a concentrated burst of potential energy, ready to be released into a world that desperately needs your creativity.”

The triathlon, as Sara put it, is officially over.

So one last time, glasses up. (A heartfelt thank you to Anno Domini, for the prosecco that fills them).

To the Class of 2026: you didn’t just finish a programme. You became the people who could finish it. And whenever you feel nostalgic, remember, the H in H-FARM stands for humans. And these humans, this campus, this family, they will always be your home.

Congratulations. You’ve made it. 💙