Mes Amis Allumés

Italian culture does not support or encourage quirkiness. Perhaps it exists somewhere, but even within the walls of the Scuola Normale Superiore (SNS), the Harvard of Italy, it’s hard to find. I’d been thinking that it must just be me and a run of bad luck until I finally fell into a group of foreigners scattered throughout the different SNS colleges (dorms) who all confirmed my observations. In the US, we have a time in which people can exist between childhood and adulthood, those few years known as college. This period of limbo when we experience our first taste of freedom but are not yet burdened with the full responsibility associated with adult independence does not exist broadly in Italy. Most Italian students live with their families throughout their undergrad years, and their universities do not have campuses or extracurricular student organizations. This leads Italians to not fully understand or appreciate the young, energetic culture on which many (American, at least) college students thrive.

Fortunately, I finally found some kindred spirits, even if it took a fair bit of time. In mid-November, one day while in line for dinner at the SNS cafeteria, I caught a few words of English while my iPod was switching between songs. Slipping off my earbuds, I realized I was standing right in front of a couple British students. After a bit of internal turmoil as to whether or not it would be too awkward to interrupt their conversation with an obviously American "Hi!," particularly after having stood in front of them for the past ten to fifteen minutes, my urge to converse with some people who shared my native language got the best of me and thus I turned around. The two, Jack and Lucy, happen to be Italian literature students from Oxford and Cambridge spending the year abroad. We ended up eating dinner together that night and though we didn’t see each other again for nearly two weeks, Jack and I caught up again over my Thanksgiving feast. From there our friendship snowballed into something that’s colored my entire experience in Pisa.

Soon I met all of their friends, a group of literature, history, art history, and film students from France, Spain, and Germany. Conveniently, we’re all at about the same linguistic level such that, though they don’t help my Italian like native-speakers do, they make for a much more balanced conversation. Furthermore, we all have some sort of a working knowledge of almost everyone else’s native language such that at times our communication can become somewhat of a linguistic mélange. Together, we’ve shared many meals, afternoon coffees, and several very random adventures including a three-legged racing competition through the Florence train station which I’m proud to say Ivan and I won! I wish I could have met the group sooner, but I feel so incredibly blessed to have fallen into this crowd at all. We’ve clicked wonderfully. They’re all absolutely crazy in a wonderful way, or allumés, to borrow a quite adequate French adjective. I haven’t laughed so hard or smiled so much since I left the US. Suddenly Europe seems a lot less big and the prospect of coming back next fall seems much less intimidating.