Newtown High School Junior Named Miss Italy USA

By Nancy K. Crevier

Melania Fitzgerald, a junior at Newtown High School, is the 2007 Miss Italy USA. She will travel to Italy in June to compete at the national level. -Fucsia Fitzgerald photo

Melania Fitzgerald is a fairly typical 16-year-old girl. She is down to earth and her family describes her as somewhat reserved. She likes to travel and is lucky enough to have visited several European and Asian countries. An honor student, Melania has also found time to put in more than 200 hours of community service. She dresses in T-shirts, jeans, and running shoes most days and much prefers the heel of her riding boot as she saddles up her horse, Seeka, to a four-inch heel on a stiletto.

Yet, four-inch heels are just what Melania wore as she strode down the runway this past March to be crowned Miss Italy USA in Miami, Fla. Melania, a junior at Newtown High School, and the daughter of Thomas and Fucsia Fitzgerald, will travel to Milan, Italy, in June to compete with 39 other girls from around the world for the Miss Italy of the World crown. They are the cream of the crop, selected from a starting pool of nearly 7,000 young women around the world. Coming this far in the competition is a surprise to her, said Melania, who had never entered a pageant before March. Having a beauty queen in their ranks is a surprise to her friends, too; Melania did not even tell her buddies that she was in the competition until the day before she left for Florida.

Her foray into the world of beauty pageants started the summer of 2006 when vacationing with her family in Italy. A friend of the family, involved in the fashion industry, urged Melania's mother to consider entering her daughter in the contest sponsored by Sascha fashions of Italy. "I encouraged her. I thought it would be fun," said Mrs Fitzgerald. After hesitating initially, Melania, who has spoken Italian at home since she was a toddler, agreed and found herself in New York City March 4 to compete for the first selections.

"I was a little nervous. I was the youngest one there and it seemed like a lot of the girls had more experience and knew what to do," said Melania. Unlike the Miss America contest, there is no talent portion of the competition, said Melania. "The judging was based on personality and comportment mostly," she said, and what was tricky was the fact that the judges were anonymous. "You could be talking to anyone during the day and without your knowing it, they could be a judge. After a while, I could kind of guess who might be a judge, but I never knew." The most challenging part of the day for her, said Melania, was not the swimsuit competition or even balancing on four-inch heels for the formalwear portion of the show, but learning the dance that the girls performed that evening.

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