The Two Towers

"Its snowing in Forli," my roommate said, with some surprise. We were standing in our kitchen making lunch, with the tv news on in the background. Forli is about forty minutes from here, farther south and closer to the Adriatic. If it was snowing there, surely it wouldn't be long before the storm reached Bologna.

I'd just finished the last of my exams. The wonderful but nerve-wracking thing about Italian oral exams is that the professor "verbalizes" the grade - i.e. tells you what it is immediately. "26 [of 30]. No wait, if you can tell me how Liszt is related to programmatic music, I'll give 27," to quote my music professor. The point being, I already knew I'd passed everything. I had four days left in Italy, and I didn't have to spend them in my room drinking gallons (liters?) of tea and trying to memorize the entire history of Latin America. What could I do with my freedom?

Washing up, I glanced out the window. Snow. Absolutely no doubt about it. Snow!  "Giulia, sta nevicando! [its snowing]" "Grazie, Anna," my roommate laughed at me, but I didn't care. I wanted to immediately run outside, like a five year old, and spin around in circles in the courtyard.

By the time I'd found my gloves and got outside, though, the sun was back out. But there was just the fainted coating of snow on the cars in the street. I decided there couldn't be a better moment to do the most touristy thing Bologna had to offer. Though I've been here three and a half months, I still hadn't climbed the tower. Le Due Torri, or the two towers, are at the heart of Bologna, and I walked past them almost everyday, but I had never been to the top.

the Torre strung with Christmas Lights

There is a superstition that if a student climbs to the top before they have finished their studies, they won't graduate. Now, I don't usually believe in this kind of thing - I'm pretty sure I stepped on all the "stones one is never supposed to step on" at Yale in the first week of class, before I knew any better (though if I somehow flunk out in my senior year, we'll know why). Nonetheless, I had waited, but now that I was finished with the exams, there was nothing to hold me back.

I'm actually so glad I chose today. Not only did the city look breathtaking with the snow on the roofs, the view was better with familiarity. I could pick out all the streets and buildings I walk by, and even see the smoke rising from the chimney of my palazzo. It was a perfect way to realize just how much I have come to know the city, at the same time that I couldn't believe I'd never seen it from this vantage before. It was truly saving the best for last.

ancient wooden stairs, going up, and up, and up...

Shadow of the tower, and the snow clouds heading north

Piazza Maggiore and San Luca on the hilltop

Bologna la Rossa

Patriotism and Pronouns

Warning: this post may be overly influenced by having read too many essays about constructivism and discourse analysis on too few hours of sleep.

Today I survived the first in a series of end-of-term ordeals: an oral presentation, in front of my entire class, in Italian. Though my attempt to produce an analysis of the European Security and Defense Policy was dogged by many errors of grammar and phrasing, the biggest problem wasn't on account of the language barrier. Actually, I found myself hesitating about how describe Americans - specifically, with which pronoun.

It drove home the point that I was a foreigner, the only non-European in a class on European international relations. Normally I would have said "we provide leadership in NATO" without a second thought, but in this context, there was no "we", only "me" (alone, being judged....cue the gibbering). I certainly wouldn't want to imply personally responsibility for the actions of my government by saying "we", particularly when talking about policies I don't necessarily support. I don't accept it when non-Americans tell me, "you invaded Iraq". No, I didn't: I was 13 at the time, not that it stopped me from protesting angrily.

All the same, it felt wrong to say "they", like it was somehow disloyal, as well as dishonest, to turn my own nation into the Other. What a complicated thing patriotism is! In the end I ducked the tricky questions of collective responsibility by just saying "America" and "it". With that distance in my pronouns I could position myself in a neutral space, belonging to no nation. That's how I feel a lot of the time in Italy - like a citizen of the world, neither native nor foreign. Yet at the same time I never feel so American as when I am abroad. I love and appreciate America more when confronted with the alternatives, but that doesn't mean that all of the comparisons are favorable. I don't wish to be held to account for the actions of my country, perhaps because I already hold myself responsible for everything I would like my country to be. It is the part of me that reflexively wants to say "we". That sense of duty, more than any sense of superiority, tells me that I am a patriot. 

 I've got two more oral exams left, and one written one, but I'm going to celebrate my Americanness by procrastinating and watching How I Met Your Mother. 

Creative Protests

This is one of the best posters I've seen from the anti-Gelmini protests (see my previous post). At the top it says, "We attack the profits/ we gain (our) rights." Then below: "There is money for the University... guess who has it?" The answer, clearly, is Berlusconi and his friends, who are constantly under attack for corruption and cronyism. I love the image of the little fish banding together to eat the big one. It's a classic leftist argument - that there isn't actually a crisis of public funding that requires cuts to services, but the misuse of public funds by mogul-politicians who encourage businesses to avoid paying taxes. Italy does have a growing debt crisis, and does desperately need reform - but that doesn't stop this kind of populism from also being true.

This is a photo I took of another demonstration in Bologna. These protesters are wearing placards made to look like the traditional Italian death announcements, but that read "RIP the Public University".

My absolute favorite banner, though, is this one, protesting Gelmini's cuts to research funding. I saw this online, so I'm not sure what city its from. The banner tells the balding Prime Minister:

BERLUSCONI

If you have any hair

Its only thanks to the research

"Stay on the barricades for a real education"

Taking to the streets, Via Zamboni

I was sitting in class when I first heard the shouts from the courtyard below. A young man with dreadlocks and a bullhorn strode into the lecture hall, opened a window and shouted down "Come up." Within moments, the room had been taken over by more than one hundred student protesters. My professor made no fuss, simply gathered up his notes and sat down in the front row to see what would happen next. The dreadlocked student went up to the microphone. "Prodi thinks he'll be speaking here," he said, referring to the former Italian Prime Minister, scheduled to deliver a lecture from that podium later in the day, "That's what he thinks, but he's not going to be able to do it now." The occupation of the university had begun.

I wrote about the Gelmini reform (named for the sponsoring minister, one of Berlusconi's beautiful young hench-women) in my post on the strike at the beginning of October. On November 30th, the legislation passed in parliament, and in the days leading up to and now following the vote, the educational system went into revolt. Students occupied the Colleseum and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and high schoolers went on strike and took to the streets. The clashes with the police at one protest in Bologna even made the cover of the New York Times (which itself was reported as news on Italian tv). In the political science department, the front gates are drapped with banners, and a desk has been pulled across the entry. Graffiti read, "Stay on the barricades for a real education". Inside its mostly quiet - a few classes still go on, though with fewer students - and the rigged-up speaker system was playing "What If God Were One of Us?", not the most raucous protest anthem. Nonetheless, my classroom that was taken over on Tuesday is still full of sleeping students, and the professor didn't even try to hold lessons for the rest of the week.

My Italian friends are mostly taking a passive role in all of this, but they accept it as normal and legitimate. As an American, though, I can't quite wrap my head around it. I've tried to explain to my friends that we just don't have protests like this. But then how do you make it known when you don't like something, they ask. How do you protest if you don't take to the streets? That's the response I've gotten from everyone, even my friend who just finished his service in the police. When I stop to think about it, its a perfectly reasonable question. Why don't Americans, and American students in particular, ever protest? In the 60s and 70s, American students occupied their universities just like their compatriots in Europe did. Why does it seem so inconceivable now?

One of my professors tried to explain the disparity by reference to the Turner Thesis, (bringing back my memories of cramming for the AP US History exam). Turner argued that the western frontier, and later the idea of mobility that it created in the American imagination, served as an escape valve for social tensions. Unions are weaker in America than in many European countries, my professor proposed, precisely because there is often the sense that rather than staying and fighting to improve conditions, one can always move on and try one's luck elsewhere. Its a classic example of Hirschman's exit/voice correlation - in Italy, the relative lack of class mobility means that its easier to organize collective action around class-based issues. The lack of alternatives to the public university system means that students are willing to fight to preserve its functioning and affordability.

All this makes me wonder if the American perception of opportunity and mobility at times holds us back from seeking real change. I wouldn't want to give it up: the persistence of the American Dream allows our country to continue to reinvent itself; neither do I mean to say that class conflict is a good thing. There's a trade-off between quality and equality, and a reason that the top American universities surpass most European ones. Yet in Italy, university is nearly free: with fees, it might cost at most 1,000 Euros a year, while Yale charges $53,000 and even public universities costs are in the tens of thousands. After Gelmini, Italian universities will be a little poorer, a little less accessible, a little less able to compete globally. But they will still cost much, much less than American ones.

My mother had another explanation for why her generation was willing to protest against the Vietnam war, while my generation hasn't mobilized against Iraq and Afghanistan: the draft. Today, without the threat to make us feel personally involved, its hard to get worked up. Its also been said that young people today aren't apathetic, but post-partisan, that our support for Obama showed that we are more interested in cooperation than confrontation. However, Obama's struggles have shown some of the limits of this type of approach. Access to higher education is an issue of immediate importance to college students. Maybe we should take a little inspiration from our European friends - we don't have to take to the streets, but we could at least speak up to defend our own interests.