Salve!

I had the most eye-opening experience about how ingrained being multilingual is in Italy during my drawing class. A little boy about seven years old came and sat with me in Piazza Massimo D’Azeglio. I was drawing the main fountain in the Piazza for an assignment with a felt tip inking pen. The boy had brought his own sketchbook and started drawing the fountain as well. Intrigued by my competition I pointed to his sketch wanting to see what he was drawing. He said, “would you like to see” and couldn’t help but feel stupid for assuming the boy wouldn’t be able to speak English because he was so young. As we talked more, I was really taken aback at the level at which he could communicate, and we continued to draw together for the rest of my class. He ended up drawing a simple strip of comics about the birds in the fountain and titled it in English for me to read. There is so much I uncovered from this experience, one is the value of speaking more than one language, two is the European school system’s impressive emphasis on languages, and finally how much you can learn by connecting with local people.

The Italian language can be easier to pick up on especially if you’ve taken other romance languages before. After being in Florence for about a month now I have seen my French help me with a lot of menus, but also hider me. For when I want to say something in Italian I think in French. Though I wouldn’t say that it’s necessary to learn Italian to get around Florence since most people speak a decent level of English as I described above. Nevertheless, Syracuse requires its student to take a language class while in the country of their center. All the Italian courses at Syracuse Florence are very individually based on the professor’s preference. Each course is two and a half hours long which is personally a little straining for my attention span. Furthermore, it is only twice a week which makes it hard to consistently practice when you don’t necessarily have to use it to get around. This doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable to try. I honestly feel that Italians are one of the most caring people and you can tell they appreciate when you try to speak Italian to them instead of English. So I highly recommend learning at least the basics.

Ciao,

Rebecca