The first day I arrived in Genoa, I couldn’t figure out how to eat dinner. I had flown in to the capital of Liguria in northern Italy on a Saturday, from Boston via Munich. A teacher from the institute where I’d spend five weeks of my summer learning Italian picked me up at the airport and drove me to the rental apartment I had found through AirBnB. The teacher was a young local woman who spoke lightly accented but fluent English. We passed the harbor and drove through the city proper – from the very first moment I saw it, I was transfixed by Genoa’s strange appearance: that of a once-thriving port town now gone partially to seed. The buildings are grimy and you have to be careful about which side streets you walk down, even in midday brightness but there are beautiful churches practically on every corner and palm trees lining the streets and the smell of the ocean is everywhere. When we arrived in the piazza closest to my apartment, she stopped the car and we dragged my heavy suitcases up a small, cobblestone-studded alley. Outside the building we met my landlady (in name)/host mom (in practice). While she and I would eventually become very close, that first day we were hopeless – despite stilted conversations through the rental website, she spoke next to no English and I spoke absolutely no Italian. That first afternoon we mainly just smiled a lot and gestured everything from “it’s so nice to meet you!” to “where are the extra towels?” After I had settled in, I needed food. When I came back to the main part of the apartment from my little second-floor studio, no one else was home so I figured I was on my own for dinner. I walked into (no exaggeration) three different restaurants, got asked something in Italian (most likely something innocuous, like “table for one?”), panicked and ran out. I wish I had a less embarrassing first-day-of-my-marvelous-adventure-abroad story, but that’s it. Eventually, I walked into a little convenience shop, nearly crying from hunger, and mimed to woman at the deli that if I didn’t eat within 5 minutes I would pass out and/or die (my miming skills are apparently fantastic under pressure). She made me sit down on a little stool next to the counter and bustled around the store, slicing bresaola for a sandwich, picking out two beautifully ripe peaches, and pointing out a fridge brimming with cold bottles of water.
Genoa’s Piazza de Ferrari
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I’m going to stop myself right here and clarify something. Not every study abroad program is charming and delightful. A lot of them are enriching and interesting but more heavily scheduled and leave less room for independent cultural experience. I split my ten weeks in Italy between Genoa, a little city by the sea, and Rome, the country’s capital. Anyone who spent any time with me in between my two stints in Genoa is probably groaning right now, given that the food/cuisine/people/beaches of that city were pretty much all I could talk about. While Rome was incredible – I met some very special people, traveled all over and around Rome tracing texts from antiquity, and ate pretty life-changing carbonara – my time up north is what I want to focus on here. In Rome, I was a part of a program with 30+ other students, whereas in Genoa I lived alone in an apartment and was the only student in a class that got out at 1 p.m. every day. That neither means that I didn’t love the experiences I had in Latium nor that I was totally lonely in Liguria. But it does mean that in Rome I was an American student in an academic program, while in Genoa I was a 20-year-old living and learning independently. I miss many things about Italy now that I’m back at school: the possibility of finding unbelievable sites around every innocuous street corner, the tradition of aperitivo (or, having happy hour and snacks for dinner), the 24-hour bakery in Rome (nothing satisfies at 4 a.m. after a night of listening to pounding house music like a Nutella-filled donut), and the people I met who are now scattered all over the world. However, the absolute hardest thing to adjust to now that I’m once again living in dorms at Harvard is feeling completely cut-off from the mentality the northern Italian lifestyle graced me with.
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Living in Genoa was like living in a dream. After that terrifying first day, things got easier… and then they got better. I would wake up with the three sets of French windows in my bedroom thrown open to the sun and the salt air. I would wave to the old man tending to his rooftop garden in the building next to mine.
Then I would pop down to the little bar down the street from me and knock back a hyper-strong espresso, Italian-style (standing up, hot coffee stinging my throat, chasing it with a shot glass of icy sparking water – in and out in under 30 seconds) and grab a cornetto to go. Then, class. At the half-way point in my four-hour daily lesson, there was always a coffee break – either to the alley-cloaked café down the street with the best cappuccinos you’ve ever tasted, or, if I was lucky, to the little beach neighborhood of Boccadasse, 15-minutes away by bus, for a slightly more leisurely cup of espresso.
Espresso in Boccadasse, in between classes
After class, cooking lunch in my apartment or going to a hilltop restaurant for a cheap plate of handmade pasta and delicious pesto (invented in Genoa!) and a glass of cold Ligurian white wine. Next, time for a quick nap and then another cup of coffee (no more cappuccinos though – any Italian worth their salt will look down at you for consuming milk after 1 pm). My professor used to say that Italians live on a constant cycle of relaxing with wine and then waking up with coffee, and I quickly realized many alternated the two as often as three or four times a day. Evenings were spent at various cafes – Caffè degli Specchi (with an amazing tiled mirror ceiling) or Banano Tsumani (on the end of a dock right on the water, with an entertainment-providing name to boot) – ordering Campari spritzes and getting a slew of free snacks served alongside that perfect drink. Then home to listen to my landlady’s 9-year-old twins chatter in Italian about their newest pop culture obsessions, often not understanding more than “…Katy Perry!!!…” amongst their high-pitched, fast-paced excitement. Throughout the day, listening to Puccini, reviewing verb conjugations, speaking to as many locals as possible – trying to absorb the language I was trying to learn in five short weeks. Weekends were spent exploring the city proper or swimming in Camogli, a town on the Italian Riviera 20 minutes from Genoa, and sitting salt-soaked in tiny seaside restaurants consuming enormous plates of spaghetti con vongole.
Beach at Camogli, on the Italian Riviera
Spaghetti con vongola at Ristorante Rosa in Camogli
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Obviously, coming back to the realities of problem sets and chilly Cambridge after a summer in a place like Genoa was never going to be easy. I knew I would miss the people I met and the ocean and the cocktails and the focaccia. But some things about adjusting back to being an American college student after being a summer student in Italy are proving to be harder than I realized. What I truly miss about studying abroad is the mentality I had not only about my academics, but also about my daily life. Homework at Harvard is all about performance and achievement, whereas the work I was doing in Italy was truly and purely for the sake of exploring something new. Learning Italian was a daily challenge that I got to immerse myself in; I could live and breathe my studies without it feeling like work at all. Beyond that, everything has a slower pace in Genoa. Besides the strictly timed morning coffee ritual, time is a little more fluid. At first my deeply ingrained German sensibilities balked at the possibility that a meeting time could be “vague” but eventually I learned to relax. I still saw the people I needed to see, and did the things I needed to do, without keeping a strict eye on the clock. Getting ready stopped being a matter of hours in front of the mirror and became hopping out of the ocean, swiping on another coat of mascara and a dash of lipstick, letting the salt dry into my hair, and letting the sun and the air whipping through the convertible do the rest. Lunches stretched longer, walks extended further, drinks lingered later, and I could feel the knot that’s been lodged at the base of my neck for years unfurling like a white flag – I surrender.
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The poet Erica Jong once wrote, “What is the fatal charm of Italy? What do we find there that can be found nowhere else? I believe it is a certain permission to be human, which other places, other countries, lost long ago.” While right now it seems completely impossible that I will ever breathe as easily, or adventure as readily, or live as calmly as I did in Genoa, all I can do is put my faith in imported Moka pots and the Puccini station on Spotify and hope my friends don’t kill me the next time I show up for something on “Italian time” … again.
One last view of Genoa…