Night falls on Bologna. The towers are all tucked in and ready for sleep.
The students continue to pound the pavement.
What an unbelievable day. I lectured for four continuous hours and then went out for "apertivos" with some of my students. Apertivos are an inverse Happy Hour. You pay more for drinks (lots more), but you get free food. The better the food, the more you pay for drinks. Some people here treat apertivo as dinner. Others, I presume, just have more dinner. The synergies between students and apertivos have to be seen to be believed.
My students told me that I had to go out to this osteria called Osteria del Orso ("Tavern of the Beer" to you anglos) so I did. Here's the scene: small outdoor seating area across the street from the entrance abutting a six hundred year old church. ("We don't have a sidewalk, so let's use the church's!). You walk in and there are three tables that seat six. That's it. And they're packed. Then you hear some noise and you head downstairs and find a medium sized room filled with people playing a little game called "let's see how many people can laugh and talk at the same time." Seems almost too much fun and you become convinced that up until this moment you didn't know you'd had a Calvinist upbringing.
Even better, after sitting down and getting a menu you notice that not a single person, as in no one, has any food yet. And they don't care. They're all too busy saying "no, watch me, I can laugh while talking" Thirty minutes later, you're still waiting for the second visit from the waiter and you decide better come back some other time.
I don't k
now the reason but today several groups of schoolchildren were touring the city. They couldn't have been local because they were all so excited about the many towers. Torre! Torre! The little boys would shout as they pointed in the air at the towers. Now you might wonder, how you point at a tower under a portico, and the answer is you don't. You can only see the towers at corners, which drives the boys crazy with excitement. From the teacher's perspective, the whole tower thing just adds an unnecessary degree of difficulty to getting boys across intersections.
Once again, while walking home I happened by all the students hanging out on the cement chatting, smoking, and drinking. This is the anti-Stanford, where everyone is hyper or as the say here "iper" fit, healthy, studious, and ambitious. Here, it's all about being cool. Very cool. People here smoke cigarettes about the diameter of a swizzle stick.Tomorrow's another big day. Along with Jon Elster (who's just popped in from Paris for the occasion), I'm participating in a public panel on the topic of the problems caused by excessive ambition. I kid you not. (I even saw the event advertised in the local paper.) I can only imagine that upon my return to the states, that I'll be invited to share my two cents on the problem of excessive compassion in New York.
Oh well. Eleven hours then it's my turn to strut and fret across the stage. Shirt's Pressed. Pants cleaned. And, far more important, fifteen hours until the arrival of Jenna, Orrie, and Cooper. I wonder if they're bringing Bounder....
