Italy

I can't believe I've been here three weeks already. It feels like it's been both ages longer than that and much shorter.

Last week was an exhausting week, with classes from 10 to 3 every day and several hours' worth of homework after that. And add in the fact that it takes a half hour to walk from the apartment to classes. Now that I've just put that in writing, it doesn't seem like all that much, but for some reason I was never able to get enough sleep. And this weekend, there's been no relaxing either... Saturday we were up bright and early for a day trip to Ferrara with the program, and today for a day trip to Florence with my roommates Dana and Eric.

Ferrara is a little town in Emilia-Romagna, just half an hour from Bologna by train. There's not a whole lot to see there, aside from a fifteenth-century castle, but it's a picturesque, well-preserved Renaissance city. It's most well-known in my mind as the setting for The Garden of the Finzi-Contini, a film and a book by Giorgio Bassani about Italian Jews during the Holocaust.

Anyway, it would have been fun to have just been able to wander around and explore, but with these program trips, we're stuck following a guide around the whole time. In theory, it would be great to have an opportunity to hear about the background and significance behind all of the buildings we see. But in reality, I have an attention span of about forty-five minutes and the guided tours last four hours. Plus, listening to someone speak in Italian, especially the dreary monotone voice that this woman had, requires extra effort and thus leads to spacing out. How long can you stand in front of one building and listen to someone describe it?

There a couple of program-sponsored day trips left, one to Padova and one to Mantova (Padua and Mantua in English). My roommates have been talking about it, and both of those are places we want to see, but we're not sure if we want to do the program-led guided tour thing again. We'll see.

My roommates, Eric and Dana, and I decided to go to Florence on Sunday for a day trip of our own. Dana had heard from a mutual friend of ours who's studying there that there was going to be a chocolate festival, so we decided to go check it out. It was exciting for me because it was my first time venturing outside of Emilia-Romagna and my first time really traveling independently, with friends and without adults.

It was fun, even though I wasn't thoroughly impressed with Florence. It's a beautiful city, with lots of little narrow streets and Renaissance buildings, but it's incredibly touristy. We probably came across three times as many Americans in one day in Florence than we have in 3 weeks in Bologna. Being there reminded me why I chose to study in Bologna... as hard as it is to feel integrated into Bolognese life, it would be impossible in Florence to ever stop feeling like a tourist.

Still, it was nice just to be able to wander around without chaperones, go in whatever direction we felt like, not have to worry about a schedule or itinerary, lose ourselves in swarms of Asian tourists and just absorb the atmosphere. We managed to cover a lot of the city, even without a planned agenda - we saw the Duomo, climbed the bell tower, wandered through the chocolate festival, hiked to the San Michelangelo park overlooking the city, and had an amazing lunch. It was comprehensive, but relaxed at the same time.

Being in Florence also made me realize that when I travel this semester, I really want to avoid big touristy cities in favor of smaller places that are more authentic representatives of their cultures. Lately we've been talking a lot about our travel plans for the semester, and naturally each of us has a different list of places we want to see. The big priorities among my roommates are Paris, London, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Copenhagen... but if I leave Europe having just seen the biggest, well-known cities. If I go to France, I want to go to Marseilles or Bourdeaux, and if I go to the U.K., I'd rather see a few smaller cities in England and Ireland, and so on. I know I'll be really disappointed. I'm pushing for Budapest, Prague, San Sebastian, Stockholm, and Sicily, but I'm not sure I'll be able to find traveling companions for all of those. I don't want to let that stop me from seeing the places I want to see, though, so I think I'll be traveling alone part of the time.

The idea of wandering around an unfamiliar city where I don't speak the local language is a little scary, but the fact that it scares me makes me all the more eager to try it. I know several girls who've traveled alone and not only survived but said it was a really positive experience for them. I'm sure some places are probably safer than others to be traveling alone, so I'll have to do some research beforehand. But I don't want to let the fact that I'm a girl keep me from having a fuller experience.

A few pictures of Florence:




A chocolate castle at the chocolate festival

This is the slightly sketchy deserted train station on the outskirts of Florence where we took our train back to Bologna. The little figure in the center is my roommate Eric.

So Dana and I headed over to the bathroom, and as we were walking up to it we saw a woman waiting outside with her back to us. When we were right next to her she turned around and we saw that she was holding a ferret in her arms. I was so taken aback by it that I said "Oh my god" really embarrassingly loudly. Then she asked us, in Italian, if we could hold it for her while she went to the bathroom. Both of us were so stunned that it took us a few moments to get out a "si, si." And as soon as she went into the bathroom we burst out laughing at the absurdity of the situation, standing outside a dark, deserted, sketchy train station holding an Italian ferret. Anyway, even though my pictures didn't come out well, here's Dana with her chocolate and the ferret :

A really adorable dog that I followed around taking pictures of creepily.

Awkward childhood encounter outside the cathedral in Ferrara

My roommates Jennie and Dana with another kid in our program, Max, in Ferrara, where apparently balloon animals are all the rage.

Yesterday I met my language partner, Federica, for the first time. Everyone in the program is assigned a language partner, who's responsible for showing us around Bologna, answering questions about the University, and basically just chatting with us in Italian. The program arranged for us all to meet up at a little place called Caffe Bravo, for aperitivi. Apparently it's common in Italy to go out for a drink at 5 or 6, before dinner.

My impression is that the language partners vary in their enthusiasm and commitment: some want to be best friends, others are less accessible. Federica, I think, is somewhere in between. She's 22 and just graduated from the University, and she's working full time at a small magazine. She majored in political science, and she said she eventually wants to work for an international organization. She speaks English fluently - she studied abroad in Ireland for six months, and she also worked for a summer in Kenya. She wants to go back to Ireland for a master's in International Relations.

I was supposed to ask her about the good pizzerias and what classes to take at the university, but we ended up having a pretty serious conversation about the state of Italy. I've talked to several different Italians since I've been here, and they all say the same thing about the way Italy's going down the toilet, etc. etc. I've heard about this attitude before - I read an article in the NYT about how Italians are the least happy in all of Europe, and in my classes at Brown we've learned about Italians' pessimism about their country. My professors at Brown were always skeptical about the notion that Italy is somehow backwards compared to other countries, so I never thought much about it. But my language partner offered a really grim view of Italy.

In the U.S., when kids talk about their futures, they talk about where they see themselves settling, could they imagine themselves living outside of the States, etc. But Italians don't even have the luxury of that choice. Federica was saying that in italy there just aren't jobs for the young people out of college, even with advanced degrees. The jobs that are available just don't pay well enough to allow for a decent living. And the hope of finding a job is not in studying hard and getting good grades, but in having connections. Italy's not a meritocracy. In Ireland, she said, at least you know that if you work hard and do well, you'll be able to make a living. Italian young people can't even think about giving their children the upbringing they've experienced, because they're forced to leave their country to find jobs.

I think it would be naive to think that in the U.S., too, especially in business and politics, having connections doesn't make a huge differences. Americans seem to have the opposite problem as Italians, seeing their country in an exaggeratedly optimistic light. But we do have a sense, and not an unfounded one, that if we work hard we'll be all right. It's something that I think we always taken for granted, something that we don't even think about until we go somewhere where that's not the case.

So I've been in Bologna for four days by now, though it feels like it's been much longer. I don't think it's quite hit me that I'll be here for seven more months, either. It's such a longer time than I've ever spent away from home, it's difficult to wrap my head around it.

I'm pretty happy with my situation so far. It's been rainy and gray ever since I got here, but the city's still beautiful and I can tell it will be awesome in the spring. The main part of the city is surrounded by a medieval wall, and at the very center of the city is a big square, Piazza Maggiore. Piazza Maggiore is basically the center of the action, with the University and all the student hang-out spots right nearby. My apartment is just outside the medieval walls, which means it's a good 15-20 minute walk to the Piazza Maggiore, and more like 20-25 minutes to the University. Of the Brown-owned apartments, it's one of the furthest from the center.

Views from my apartment window

At first, I was a little disappointed about this, but actually it's not so bad. We live in an apartment complex in a more residential area, so though we don't live around most of the Unibo (University of Bologna) students, we live around real Bolognese people, which is pretty cool in itself. A mother and her kid live next door, and a gay couple who constantly gets into heated arguments lives below us.

There are six of us in my apartment altogether, three guys and three girls. Four of us are Brown students, one from Harvard, and one Italian. I like living in a rather big group - there's always someone to watch TV with, or go to the grocery store with. Based on what I've seen of the other kids in the program, I'm glad with the mix of personalities I've ended up with. Most of my roommates are really good at Italian, especially the Harvard guy who seems practically fluent. They all seem pretty adventurous, up for traveling and exploring. (Unfortunately I still haven't found someone who's up for going to Morocco with me!)

My Italian roommate is named Matteo and is from Sardinia (Sardegna), the island next to Corsica off Italy's coast. He speaks very little English -- he joked that the only phrase he knows is "This is the table," though that's a bit of an exaggeration. He also knows how to say random things like "peace and love." It's nice, though, because it forces us to speak Italian with him. I've heard from some of the other Brown students that their Italian roommates are fluent in English and so they always end up speaking English. Since he's sardo, his accent is a bit different from the standard Italian, and some of my roommates have trouble understanding him. Sardinians speak in kind of fits and starts, with long pauses and then a jumble of words mushed together. I'm more used to it, since I had a Sardinian Italian teacher for a year at Brown who spoke in exactly the same way.

So far we've done only a few organized things with the other Brown students... we had dinner on the first day, a little tour of Bologna, and yesterday a visit to a medieval museum. Since our apartments are kind of spread out throughout the city, we haven't seen the other Brown students outside of those activities. I was a little surprised, because a lot of us don't know each other already and I thought the program might make more of an effort to help us mingle and get to know each other. I think, though, that they'd rather we not hang around together - they want us to be totally immersed in Italian language and Italian life. I guess that's a good thing, but right now when we don't know any Italians it feels a little isolating.

It also doesn't help that people can pick us out as Americans everywhere we go. Every time we're in a group and we go into a store or restaurant or pub, everyone kind of looks at us, even before we start speaking English. I guess it's something about the way we dress or carry ourselves that gives us away. On the one hand, it's a positive thing that Americans are rare enough in Bologna that they garner stares everywhere they go. But it's also a little discouraging, since we want nothing more than to blend in. My roommates and I joked that we should get our other roommate Matteo to give us lessons in looking Italian. I wonder if by the end of the semester we'll still seem hopelessly American, or whether we'll be able to blend in.

The photos in this post are the views from my apartment window. So far, I haven't been taking any pictures since it's so gray and rainy out, but once we get a bit of sun I'll start taking pictures.