Is the Dolce Vita as dolce as they say?

I’d always had my heart set on Rome. When I discovered that I would be going to Italy for my Erasmus year abroad (I study Italian), it had to be Rome. The Eternal City. The Capital of the World. That place that all those roads lead to.

So last September I arrived at Ciampino airport fresh-faced with the whole year ahead of me. The initial enthusiasm quickly dissipated. The hostel that a fellow Warwick year-abroader had booked us for the initial few days while we found a room turned out to be two weeks at a caravan site some thirty minutes away on a dodgy suburban train. Every day we would get said train in to Rome and explore, get a feel for the place. All the while we had to struggle through the long saga that was getting a room of our own. “No male students”, “No Erasmus students”, “No Students” read the classifieds; the hating was endless. And then once you found one that accepted a normal human being, you had to ring the phone number. Now, I’m one of those quasi-social outcasts that dreads speaking on the phone. Therefore, consider how difficult it was speaking on the phone to a potential landlord that was Italian (and therefore does not understand the concept of someone not being fluent in Italian). But eventually I got a room with a view of St Peter’s Basilica, and when I got bored of that, I subsequently moved to a place near what is technically-speaking the most important church in the world, which Wikipedia informs me is called in English the “Basilica of St John Lateran”, so it wasn’t all bad.

And then there was the negotiation of university life at the appropriately, but rather optimistically named La Sapienza, which means “wisdom”, “learning”, “mastery”. It’s everything you expect the largest Italian university to be: massive, spreading over various buildings on the eastern side of the city; impenetrable, in the sense that you never feel like you’ve truly learnt or mastered anything; it’s general pandemonium. Courses that seem to be running disappear with no explanation from the professors, the professors turn up to lectures later than the students, the students ask you if you want to race them up the stairs and back down again. Having said that, if the year abroad in Italy is about immersing oneself in Italian culture (and it is), I don’t think La Sapienza can be beaten in giving the quintessential Italian university experience.

Italy has the most Unesco World Heritage Sites in the world, so you can expect a lot from its capital. Indeed, there’s the Colosseum, the Spanish Steps, the Vatican City, Piazza Navona, the Monument, the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain, which are only the most famous of the true feats of what mankind can achieve when it’s not auditioning for X Factor. The Colosseum has to be one of my favourite buildings in the world (and I’ve been to Florida twice), and coming out of its underground station at night to that beauty of a building all illuminated is truly breath-taking. I have to say though that these places would have been even nicer had there not been so many fucking people. Threading yourself through the tourists, street-sellers, Erasmus students and Italians (occasionally even Romans) is a skill that can be learnt, but tolerating the Americans that relay to each other how the Colosseum was in fact built for the set of the film Gladiator, the street-sellers throwing shitty magnet things in the air to make an annoying noise, the Italians being particularly Italian; this is a skill that cannot be learnt.

Predictably, as an English person I was often castigated whenever the topic of weather came up in conversation. I’m not sure why, as in November it rained at least once a day, and the summer nights could reach 26°C. The social scene is as good as you want it to be, but most likely you’ll make some very good friends, who, thanks to Rome being the Capital of the World, will be from all over said world. One’s tolerance of the pop music really does inversely correlate with how much you listen to. The trains are on time. The television is good only if you want to marvel at the use of extraneous females.

You may have gathered from my surname that I am half-Italian. Therefore any criticism I give of Italy is like criticising half of myself. To my misfortune I don’t think I appreciated Rome when I was there, and I’m not sure I fully appreciate it now. I was thinking of writing about my Erasmus experience for a while, and with the protests-come-a-few-people-rioting there a few months ago and then the long-awaited departure of Silvio ‘Bunga Bunga’ Berlusconi, I’m really starting to miss this great place. But as a wise man once said, “Only in Rome is it possible to understand Rome”, and I sincerely recommend the Erasmus scheme to everyone. And no, nobody in the Italian Department told me to say that.