My Week Learning Italian in Florence — Kisses From The Clouds

As I settle into my seat and take the offered champagne from the suspiciously handsome flight attendant, I wonder why I am doing this.

The this in question? strapping myself into a full week of “Super Intensive” Italian language classes in Florence during my scheduled vacation week. I could be hanging out on a hammock on an island since it’s January, but I chose to enroll in school in a city that would prove more than slightly chilly. Who elects to do homework on their vacation?

I mean, why does a person really do anything at all, my thoughts tipsy around as I feel the sparkling wine bubbles fill my head after sip number five.

If I really wanted to be practical, I’d invest in my Spanish swagger, not my Italian serenade. I feel a brief moment of future regret... is there a specific word for that? But I’ve never been sure of anything in my life, really- most things that work out for me work out because I blindly trust that they will. It’s kind of terrifying and also pretty amazing. Like this one weekend I vacationed in Korea and thought, “yeah I guess I need to live here for a year,” and I did. And it was incredible. Had I analyzed my decision to death instead of intuiting what I needed, I might have gone back home and enrolled in graduate school, gotten a businessy job and had my own office in ten years, and probably hated my life because I require variety to stay sane. Instead, I caught the travel bug again, and became a professional hummingbird, always on the go. I’ve never been happier.

Italian is the same. It has no logical purpose to my life. It won’t help me more than any other language in my career, and it definitely isn’t easier to learn than the language I already have experience with. It’s not even essential to know Italian if you travel to Italy, as the country is saturated with American tourists for every season and is prepared to speak English so frequently they immediately say “Hello how can I help you?” if they smell your Americanness coming. I could probably move to Florence and never learn Italian, functioning just fine.

But che peccato if you avoid learning something just for the pleasure of it... Italian is not just a language, it’s music and the expression of ancient artists. Italian is meant to be loved and cherished and spoken with passion and an inherent joy for life, celebrating the existence of being human. Every sentence is a poem, a capsule of beauty.

Italian for me is my language of love, la mia lingua del’amore. I don’t need a reason to study a beautiful language, I’m doing this because I fucking want to. Because Italian makes me happy, Italy makes me happy, and speaking Italian makes me feel closer to Italy.

La lingua del amore, Italian is mine.

For some fortunate people it might very well be Spanish, in which case good for you, learn it and speak to most of the world and increase your job prospects. If your toes curl at the sound of Vietnamese, than god bless you, you should learn that language although to me it sounds worse than nails on a chalkboard made of children’s screams!

We need to stop learning things for a sense of purpose and start embracing skills because they bring us unexplainable joy, and that joy is decidedly subjective. For some, Italian sounds like a lunatic on the streets, for others - it sounds like a tall dark and handsome man approaching you with playful lust in his eyes. Rawr.

This view brings me joy, what city does it for you?

Why did I Choose Florence?

According to my personal research, the best place to learn the language is Tuscany. They speak standard Italian here, without the messy dialect problem that the south might have, and I imagine they are a bit snobby about how their dialect is more proper and “correct”.

After a very vigorous and complicated search for the best school (Google, what is the best Italian school in Tuscany?), I sign up for one week of classes at the Leonardo da Vinci school in Florence. My accommodation is set up through the school with two other students in an apartment about three minutes walking distance from the Duomo, the origination of the Renaissance. It's quite drafty but it's an Italian apartment, so I was prepared to be chilly and brought a lot of layers.

Every morning I wake up and open my window to the following view from my bedroom.

I have two roommates: Paulo and Paris, studying Italian and Sculpture respectively. Paris is from Iran, and speaks English quite well. We immediately hit it off, her friendly smile and infectious laughter difficult not to catch. Paulo is Brazilian, her visit to Florence marking her very first time on an airplane, very first time to Italy, very first time trying to speak English. She’d just come back from a trip to Rome over the weekend looking defeated; I tried to guess from her Portuguese and broken Italian what had deflated her happiness balloon. Come on girl, we’re in Italy! I tried to convey with my hand gestures and charades. Google Translate, as it turns out, is my favorite form of technology that allows us to stop depending on our human brain organs. The Google Overlords of Translation inform us that she had come all the way to Italy to visit a boy (shocking) who never ended up seeing her because of this great reveal: he has a wife. Paulo was devastated, and couldn't understand why he failed to mention this previously when they were engaging in their little love affair.

Intense rounds of boy bashing ensue, of course, and I help Google Translate advise her not to live for a man because you can’t give your heart to someone who didn’t want to give you theirs. “He’s trash,” I translate. “Basura. Oh shit, that’s Spanish, never mind. Dispiace. You really need to delete him from your phone. Like do it now, please. For all our sakes."

Quite a challenging yet entertaining endeavor. It is one of the only times I felt positively relieved to not have any drama in my life involving men, who I had come to realize through my dating life in New York that they were, overall, not worth a second thought. (Ask anyone in New York, dating here is kind of a superficial flaky wasteland of misplaced and unearned arrogance, sprinkled with a healthy dose of unexplained anxiety. But hey, I’m still hopeful because I’m a delusional romantic at heart).

“You should probably drink wine,” my google tells her in Portuguese. I don’t know what else to say, and wine has a mysterious healing power that I couldn’t explain. Paris nods in agreement, and opens bottle for us all to share. I have my first red wine in Florence, and everything is molto bene.

Come se Dici…. I Forgot Everything?

It’s been a while since I took Italian lessons, and it shows.

After the first class, I suspect my teacher hates me. My annoying compulsion to be liked threatens to destroy my success on a regular basis, and this is no different. I struggle to speak, strain to find the perfect words, ache to sound perfect, to make my mouth create music the way Italians effortlessly do. The class is more or less the same level as me, upper Elementary, some with more inclination towards speaking and others with a large vocabulary but the inhibition that keeps them second guessing themselves.

I’m the only American, and this initially keeps me self conscious— I don’t want to hear snide comments about our current political “situation” nor am I prepared to defend my culture with any sort of lasting conviction. Luckily, it seems all my paranoia is just first day jitters; everyone is stupidly nice, and when I say I’m from New York I get an echoing “Ooooh” from the class. They assume that their respective cities are not as impressive as mine, which I think is ridiculous because my classmates all hail from Tel Aviv, Seoul, Paris, Brazil, Mexico, places that I think are like, way cooler.

To clarify, my teacher definitely doesn’t hate me. She is so patient and encouraging she convinced one girl to stay, even though this girl has been struggling to the point of tears and desperately wants to go back home.

The bell rings to signal class starts and break times, an actual bell that reminds me of a dusty old schoolhouse in the 1960’s. Our classes begin from 9:00-10:15, then starts up again at 10:30-12:00. After the morning class, four of the students and I stay and continue to the "super intensive" portion of the "super intensive course", which is a separate conversation class lead by our fearless leader, Ester. She's great: funny and gregarious and perfect for initiating a casual conversation. Her teaching style is very open, very forgiving, very Italian. I discover that my vocabulary is quickly returning and I’m able to put sentences together to a fairly convincing degree, but I’m far from where I want to be with my overall speaking proficiency. I’m already making mental plans to come back in the fall to spend two weeks in classes. One week is definitely not enough time to absorb the culture to a satisfying degree.

The class itself— it’s brilliant. Ester and Vittoria speak slow enough to understand but not too slow as if she was speaking to a child. Everything is Italian, with only a few choice words in English if we are really struggling. Complete immersion is what I was needing, and I am pleasantly surprised with how much I understand without any translation.

When 2:00 rolls around, my stomach is threatening to blackmail me if I don’t feed it pasta and bread. I recruit my classmate, Aya, who is Japanese but has lived in Paris for the past 15 years. She's pretty much the most adorable human ever, and we chat about the class, Japan, and Paris while we stuff our faces with pasta. I'm excited to come home and introduce my new Body-by-Pasta to the world.

I ask her to clarify this rumor that I read about recently, involving fantasy enthused Japanese tourists who come to Paris and immediately are so distraught at their expectations being too high that they require psychiatric assistance. Hospitals for Japanese who can't handle the "disappointment" of Paris.

"Yeah, that's true," she nods. "Yep. It didn't happen to me, but a lot of Japanese have a fantasy of Paris before they come there."

I mean, I had a fantasy too but I didn't have a nervous breakdown once I got there and realized not every bench was occupied by a romantic couple wearing berets and red lipstick.

It makes me wonder if there are people who need psychiatric help in New York after being here a few months and realizing it's not exactly like Sex and the City or Breakfast at Tiffany's and much more like How to Be Single. But then again, most New Yorkers are able to talk freely about their therapists so maybe this is already happening.

Oh So This is Jet Lag. Ew.

I’ve never really had jet lag like this, because usually when I’m in Europe it’s only for 24 hours with work— I have a disciplined routine of sleeping for three or four hours upon arrival at our hotel and then drinking a strong cup of coffee after forcing myself into a very hot shower. It usually does the trick and wakes me up for a nice stroll around the city before meeting up with my crew (if they’re fun and not slam clickedy clickers). Then I stay out until around 11 or 12, come back to the hotel and sleep an hour later, hopefully for the entire night, before working the flight home the next day. Easy and breezy.

This vacation is a little different ; instead of sleeping in until whenever, I have to wake up every morning at 7:30 to go to school for a week. During class the second morning I feel my body revolt against the daylight. My skin feels coated in lead and my eyes sink into my skull. Why aren’t we SLEEPING? My mind demands. I groan, realizing it’s 2:00 am in New York and this is what normal travelers refer to as “Jet Lag”.

But I honestly can’t complain when my route to school each morning looks like this:

This can't be real life.

David, Raising the Standards for the Modern Man

Of course I had to say hi to my number one. Seeing David in person is so impressive, no context from history is necessary to appreciate.

The things I notice most about David are twofold.

One: He has enormous hands. Like, why are his hands that big? Was he a famous basketball player?

Two: He has an ass that simply refuses quit. I’m sure he does crossfit or maybe plays hockey on the weekends. Either way he is making the most of those squatting muscles.

The original David statue is housed at the Galleria di Academia, and was 12 euro to enter. The museum is small compared to most but definitely worth a stroll around. There was a pretty cool fabrics exhibit, displaying fabric from clothing of the well to do, mainly velvet with silk thread sewn into repeating patterns of animals and various flourishes. It was all quite fancy, indeed.

After the Galleria, I check my watch- 4:00pm. Too early for an aperitivo. My museum pal, Clara, and I decide to pop into the Uffizi Gallery even though the recommendation is generally to reserve a ticket days in advance. Well, not in January. There were no lines at all, we just walked up to the ticket booth and walked inside. Florence is best traveled through during the winter if your main goal is to peruse museums all day long.

We stay a couple hours and notice that most of the paintings depict the same exact Biblical stories over and over again. It’s like visiting Asian temples… once you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. We leave with our mouths salivating for pizza. Italy is art and food and wine, and we want to saturate our senses with them all!

I didn't expect to see Botticelli's Birth of Venus, which is absolutely beautiful in person.

Stone Mosaic Artisans

One thing I love about my school, Scuola Leonardo da Vinci, is the daily cultural walking tours starting after all classes are finished at 3. On Wednesday, we travel to the workshop of marble collage artists, whose techniques are kept from the traditional Italian Renaissance period.

They literally carve marble by hand and make collages from them that look like Italian Renaissance paintings. It was mind blowing.

They are indeed for sale, for a casual $10,000...

Each collage takes about a year to create, the process involving selection of colors, and this bow cutting apparatus (official term) to cut the marble by hand.

The best part of the tour is that our teacher leads us completely in Italian, and I can understand most of what she says. The comprehension stops, however, once the artisans take over and rattled away about their process. They collect stone from all over the world, and don't want to use modern technology to cut the rock (answering a question from our group, "Why don't you use lasers to cut the stone?") That question incited a small laugh and confused stare. I've noticed most things in Italy are done with a traditional mindset. You never have cappuccino after lunch, for example, because we've never done that. Why change something if it's working for us?

The tour is a great introduction into the behind the scenes of Florentine artisans, and opens my eye to how many small businesses are created here with this traditional attitude towards craftsmanship. The amount of color detail in these pictures is highly impressive. I'll come back once I win a few million with bitcoin stocks. I'm definitely kidding. Don't buy bitcoin.

Why Florence is Great for Learning Italian and Why Florence is the Worst for Learning Italian

It's Great because ....

Tuscany speaks flawless, standard, beautiful Italian that sounds just perfect, classy, and elegant
Florence is a gorgeous city, easily walkable, with views that make your heart hurt.
The schools are pretty much top notch here, with all the International students who come for study abroad here.
Florence is a very safe city; I never felt vulnerable walking by myself at all.

It's the Worst because ...

Everyone here is an international student who comes to study abroad, or a tourist, or both.
That means English is heard at every corner, and most Italians in Florence will speak to you in English if it seems like their native language might slow down the conversation.
This makes it almost impossible to practice Italian outside of the classroom, and a general annoyance at said study abroad students, who are "like really super excited" about being in Italy.

If I could do this week over again, I'd definitely elect to stay with a host family, where it wouldn't be an option to switch back and forth between Italian and English. Even with my students outside the classroom, English is the most comfortable to communicate in and we mostly speak in English together.

Happy Birthday in Eight Languages

Friday is our last day, and it's so sad! I have enjoyed my class and classmates and teachers so much. Everyone has been so supportive of each other and I feel 100% more confident when speaking outside of the classroom. The grammar and little parts of Italian that don't seem that important when you're learning have been nitpicked and engraved into my memory, and everything is beginning to click into place.

Utzi is happy today, even though he's leaving italy as well- it's his birthday and coincidentally his retirement age day. As our class is exceptionally international, we all sing him happy birthday in eight different languages : Russian, Italian, Spanish, English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Portugese. Paulina brings him a tiny chocolate cake from the cafe next door. It's so cozy at this school, I honestly don't want to leave. The students are hard working, some staying several months to become fluent, and the teachers always bring an enthusiastic attitude with them to class, which as a former TEFL teacher I know how hard that can sometimes be with beginners.

I would highly recommend this school to anyone who needs the structure of school and a language immersion program to give them a well rounded experience. They also have locations in Siena, Rome, and Milan!

Don't leave! Not yet!

Alright, so I am on this high of being in Italy that I decide to check into an Airbnb for a couple more nights. It has actual Italian frescos inside, with a painted ceiling, outdoor terrace, and a selection of furniture pieces that make it appear like a museum exhibit.

It was so swanky. I felt like a princess here.

I hang out with Aya again for a traditional apiritivo, go to museums, walk around, get my boots fixed, go shopping, and visit the Boboli Gardens which I also highly recommend. You can spend at least an hour walking through these gardens and the views are picturesque, apparently inspiring the gardens at Versailles. For some reason, all entrance today is completely free! You enter through the Palazzo Pitti, towards the back.

It's a perfect date spot, or just a general wandering around day.

Travel Diagnosis:

Florence is a wonderful city to visit, especially if you are in need of art appreciation. I would recommend my school to learn Italian for sure, you can learn more about their methods here: Scuola Leonardo da Vinci. Florence for Italian lovers is perfect for those suffering from an unexplainable crush on all things Italian, and compulsive shoppers.

Goodbye, fair Florence, 'til we meet again!