News Archive

Thanks to the work of Syracuse Florence art history graduate students, Wikipedia now has an article on the artist Elena Salvini Pierallini. The entry grew out of an editing marathon held in April as part of the program’s commitment to expanding the visibility of women artists who have been overlooked in the historical record.

Over the course of the marathon, the students researched Salvini Pierallini’s life and work, drew together scattered sources, and wrote the article that is now publicly available to readers around the world. The session was guided by Linda Falcone, of Calliope Arts foundation, and students used sources collected and translated by Syracuse Florence staff.

Two months later, a series of exhibitions and events dedicated to the artist took place in Florence, a happy coincidence that gave the students the chance to see in person the works of an artist they had come to know so well through research. Viewing her work firsthand, and joining those working to restore visibility to forgotten women artists, made the project especially meaningful.

“It was a great experience working with my cohort to contribute to the Wikipedia article. We don’t do a lot of research on contemporary art or artists in this program, so it was a great change of pace. I’m also glad I got to help create a webpage that will help others learn more about a contemporary female artist, whose work I had the pleasure of seeing in June.” — Gia Bambocci, M.A. candidate and Florence Fellow

The article is now live on Wikipedia. The students’ contribution adds to the growing body of work, led by scholars, institutions, and volunteer editors alike, to close the gender gap in art history and in the pages of the world’s largest online encyclopedia.

At the same April session, Syracuse Florence undergraduate students created a Wikipedia page for the artist Flavia Arlotta. Wikipedia’s editors have asked for revisions before the article can be published, and we are now strengthening it, including by drawing on more reliable texts provided by the artist’s descendants. We look forward to seeing the Arlotta article online soon as well.

If you’re in Florence, we’d love for you to join us at our next editing marathon on November 16, from 1:30 to 5:30 pm, dedicated to the artist Amalia Dupré. No prior Wikipedia experience is needed. Sign up here by November 9.

Graduate students, alumnae, and faculty explored the show with co-curator and Syracuse history professor Brian Brege

Syracuse Florence’s current Renaissance Art History graduate students, along with faculty, recently had a rare chance to see the new exhibition Global Florence: The World of Francesco Carletti, c. 1573-1636 with one of the people who made it. Professor Brian Brege, who teaches history at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School, co-curated the show. He led a private tour through the galleries of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, the library famous for Michelangelo’s vestibule and staircase.

Several of our current graduate students assisted with research for the exhibition catalog. During the visit they photographed themselves beside the objects they had studied. Professor Alexandria Brown-Hedjazi, who teaches the Syracuse Florence course Global Florence: Art, Trade, and Exploration, also helped coordinate the exhibition.

A walking tour of the world

The exhibition aims to immerse visitors in Florence’s visual and material culture around 1600. It draws on the collections of the Laurenziana, Riccardiana, Uffizi, Pitti, and Stibbert, among others. Prints, drawings, artifacts, and books are on display, including Jacopo Ligozzi’s colorful drawings, prints by Johannes Stradanus, Stefano della Bella, and Jacques Callot, and Medici maps. Together they show both the global in Florence and the global that came to Florence.

The organizing thread is the journey of Francesco Carletti, a Florentine merchant, explorer and writer. He left Florence in 1591 at eighteen and returned in 1606, becoming the first private traveler to circumnavigate the globe without royal or religious sponsorship. The show follows his itinerary through eight themes, from Seville and the Atlantic to New Spain and Peru, Manila and Japan, Korea, China, and India, and finally back to Europe. Each section pairs exemplary objects with passages from Carletti’s diary, so that moving from room to room feels like a walking tour of the world. Brege explained that this route gives the curators a disciplined framework for a “global” exhibition, one that keeps its chronology and its ties to Florence firmly in view.

Carletti is not presented as a hero. His first major voyage was a slave-trading expedition to Cape Verde that filled him with revulsion, and he later wrote about slavery with unusual moral unease for his time. Brege described him as an important narrator for the show, “neither hero nor villain, but a little bit of both.”

From the Atlantic to Asia

Early rooms cover Atlantic Africa and the Americas. Highlights include an ivory oliphant from the Kingdom of Congo, one of the earliest securely documented examples in the world that cost about as much as a small monkey but is now inestimably precious. Visitors also see a Ligozzi drawing of an agave, a map of Mexico City, and facsimiles of the Florentine Codex. The original codex is held in the Laurenziana but is now too fragile to exhibit. Cochineal, chocolate, and silver coins show how goods from the Americas reached Florence, and Brege corrected the popular legend that Carletti introduced chocolate to the city.

Later rooms turn to Japan and China, with a Namban lacquer coffer, a letter in Spanish and Japanese linked to the Japanese embassy to Europe, and a rare Chinese atlas annotated in Carletti’s hand. Brege said they needed special permission from China’s Ministry of Culture to show it. Only three copies are known, and this is the only annotated one.

Antonio’s story

The Korea room was a highlight of the tour. In Japan, Carletti purchased five enslaved Koreans and later freed them in India. One of them, baptized Antonio, traveled on to Europe and may be the first documented Korean there. Brege showed how his story has been retold over the centuries. A 1701 printed edition of Carletti’s text cut his criticisms of the slave trade, and Antonio later became the hero of popular Korean fiction in the 1990s.

The final section follows the voyage home, where a Dutch seizure of the ship carrying Carletti’s goods led to a long legal and diplomatic dispute involving the Medici and the Dutch East India Company.

An insider’s view

Brege also explained how the exhibition came together. Some key loans took months of negotiation, and a few textiles were still awaiting final approval on the day of our visit. * For our students, seeing the objects they had researched on display in the Laurenziana was a highlight of the semester.

“Huge thanks to Brian for so generously sharing his time with us despite his incredibly busy schedule!” said Dr. Molly Bourne, Florence graduate program coordinator.

Global Florence is on view at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana until January 9, 2027.

*Permissions were subsequently secured.

Marradi’s specialty chestnut festival, a short trip from Florence

By Kristin Hsi (Syracuse University)

MARRADI, Italy — As summer heat gives way to yellow leaves, Tuscany enters its autumn harvest season. Located in central Italy’s hills, the region has cultivated seasonal staples such as grapes, olives, fruit and grain since Ancient Rome. During the cooling months of September to November, agricultural towns celebrate this labor and heritage with Tuscany’s iconic harvest festivals.

A couple of hours by train northeast of Florence lies the town of Marradi, home to the Marradi Chestnut Festival, now known as the Marron Buono di Marradi Exhibition Market. With a woodsy landscape more like a small mountain village than a town, Marradi hosts the fair-like market in its historic center along the Lamone River every October. The event is managed by Associazione Turistica Pro Loco Marradi, with support from the local municipality and a community of university students, and showcases the town’s traditional crop through chestnut-themed exhibition walkways, fair rides, and art.

Stands sell the Marrone del Mugello IGP by the kilo. Known for being naturally crisp and sweet, the chestnut draws visitors from across Italy and as far away as Denmark, Switzerland and Germany, who come to taste freshly roasted chestnuts and meats. They leave with artisan trinkets, lavender sachets, sweet wines, jams and, of course, bags of fresh marroni to roast through the winter back home.

Professor Veronica Iubei, who teaches a course at Syracuse Florence on Italian serial crimes, presented a paper at the 3rd International Conference of the European Association of Phenomenology, Psychopathology and Psychotherapy (EAPPP), held in Athens on 2 and 3 October 2026. The conference was organized under the auspices of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and its Medical School, with support from the Institut français de Grèce and the Ambassade de France en Grèce.

Iubei’s paper began with Judith Herman’s landmark book Trauma and Recovery, which argues that people living with Complex PTSD should be seen first and foremost as survivors, not victims or merely patients. “Words matter: they convey a shared ground of reality and meaning,” Iubei said. Recovery and prevention, she argued, must go beyond medication and psychotherapy to engage with broader struggles against power structures and social injustice. Drawing on Ludwig Binswanger’s existential phenomenology, Iubei proposed that the essence of CPTSD lies in the sudden cessation of relationality, a rupture that can be repaired only if the therapist first becomes the survivor’s witness, validating that experience and giving it reality.

By Aurora Santangelo, Syracuse University

On September 27, 2026, bright pink shirts flooded the streets of Florence, an unstoppable force on a dedicated march to raise money for victims of breast cancer. Over 44,000 people from all over Italy participated in Corri la Vita wearing cyclamen-pink t-shirts, including some our own Syracuse Florence students through the I-Engage program.

Every year, thousands of students, families, children, and even dogs, participate in this fundraising event that began in 2003 by Benoda Frescobaldi to support women affected by breast cancer and fund initiatives related to prevention, early diagnosis, and treatment. Over the past 22 years more than 580,000 people have taken part and raised €10.2 million euros. Participants receive a Ferragamo-designed t-shirt (this year the color was cyclamen pink) by donating at least €10. The fashion company was built in Florence by Salvatore Ferragamo, the “Shoemaker to the Stars” famous for having designed stiletto heels for Marilyn Monroe, and the company is a longtime partner of the yearly charity event. Ferragamo himself died of cancer in 1960, and his daughter, Fiamma, of breast cancer in 1998.

Corri la Vita traditionally has two routes—one 6.2 km long and the other 11 km long—that lead all over Florence, and participants can choose to walk or run. This year, the race began at the Parco delle Cascine and finished at Piazza della Signoria. That day, pink t-shirt wearers were given free access to 68 major cultural destinations in and around the city, including the exclusive chance to discover places normally closed to the public. Highlights included the show BROKEN at Palazzo Strozzi, the Museum of Restoration with the Palazzo Ridolfi Chapel, the Accademia dei Georgofili agricultural museum, and the show OPEN at Palazzo Buontalenti. Prizes were also awarded to the top three race finishers in both the men’s and women’s categories.

Syracuse Florence students have been participating in Corri la Vita since 2007. “For our students, it’s a way to experience Florence from the inside, the way Florentines do, while supporting a cause that matters,” said Internships and Engagement Liaison Olimpia Bozza. She said that participating in the event means truly being part of the Florence experience, as those who join come away with a special memory of the city.

Corri la Vita is a shining example of how Syracuse Florence students can engage with the city of Florence, immersing themselves in the local culture while participating in meaningful volunteer work.

For some students, the semester abroad began before they even reached Florence. An 11-day traveling seminar took them from Ravenna to Venice and into Italy’s northeastern borderlands, where mosaics, monuments, and centuries of cultural exchange became the starting point for their semester.

From August 22 to September 1, students joining Syracuse Florence for Fall 2026 traveled together as part of Empires of Exchange: The Visual Cultures of Power, Mobility, and Erasure in the Mediterranean, a signature seminar led by art history professor Sean Nelson that brought students face-to-face with the works and places they would be studying, using the cities themselves as part of the classroom.

In Ravenna, the group visited the Basilica of San Vitale and its celebrated mosaics. In Venice, students explored the city’s layered history at St. Mark’s Basilica and the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Visits to Torcello and Aquileia took them farther into the northeastern reaches of the peninsula. “The students visited several sites, traveling the distance the Romans did through time and space, chasing precious works of mosaic,” said Sara Muellner, who assisted Professor Nelson on the trip.

The itinerary reflected the course’s central questions: What happens when cultures meet, borrow from one another, and reshape what came before? How can the art and architecture that was left behind help us understand those encounters?

Students encountered evidence of the many communities that have shaped the region. Roman, Byzantine, Slavic, Arab, Ottoman, Jewish, and Christian influences are part of the visual and cultural history explored throughout the seminar. Students examined how those influences moved across the Mediterranean, how they became part of shared urban spaces, and how some histories became less visible over time.

The course focuses on the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, roughly the years 1000 to 1700, while also asking students to consider what those histories mean today. Questions of migration, cultural identity, and European political identity remain connected to the histories of the cities and communities the students encountered.

The timing of the seminar made the experience particularly distinctive. Students began their study abroad experience together on the road, visiting major works and historic sites before settling into the classroom. By the time they arrived at the Syracuse Florence Center, they had already covered hundreds of miles and encountered centuries of history firsthand. Their semester began with a journey that had already given them a different way of looking at the country—and at the Mediterranean connections that continue to shape it.

When Lauren arrived in Florence in 2008 as a Syracuse University Italian major, she couldn’t have imagined that nearly two decades later she’d be back — not as a student, but as a professor helping shape the very program that changed her life.

Lauren’s path to Italian started early. Growing up in eastern Pennsylvania with Italian heritage on her mother’s side, she knew from her teens that she wanted to major in Italian and study abroad — even though her high school didn’t offer the language. She chose Syracuse for its size and reputation, and by her first semester on campus she was enrolled in Italian 101, working toward the study abroad experience she’d been dreaming of since she was 16 or 17.

That dream became real when she arrived in Florence and moved in with her host mother, Rita, a widow who lived out past Campo di Marte. In a Florence before smartphones and Wi-Fi, Lauren and her roommate spent long evenings at Rita’s kitchen table, dictionary in hand, trying to explain concepts that don’t translate neatly between languages. “It was really wonderful,” she recalls — one of the formative relationships of her time abroad. Remarkably, Rita is still hosting students today, two decades later.

Like many students, though, Lauren admits she got swept up in the group mentality of her cohort, prioritizing socializing over some of the cultural experiences she’d hoped for. It’s a regret she now shares candidly with her own students: “I wish I spent more time in Florence.” That honesty has become part of what makes her guidance so resonant for the students she advises today.

After graduating in 2009 — into the middle of the financial crash — Lauren spent two years working at a pizzeria before discovering, almost by accident, that graduate study in Italian was even possible. A friend’s Facebook post about being accepted to Middlebury’s Italian master’s program opened a door Lauren didn’t know existed. She enrolled in 2011, spending a second year in Florence — this time, she says, finally finding “her people” among fellow language obsessives in Middlebury’s immersion program.

From there, her academic path led to a PhD in Italian Renaissance literature at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she specialized in the comedic works of Machiavelli and Aretino. After finishing her doctorate in 2022, she spent a year teaching humanities in Wisconsin’s prison education system — work she calls some of the most rewarding of her career — before an opportunity arose that would bring her story full circle: a position as Assistant Teaching Professor of Italian at Syracuse University.

Since joining the faculty in January 2023, Lauren has worked to change how students see the Italian major, drawing on her own experience of graduating without a clear sense of career direction. She’s helped redesign the curriculum so students build e-portfolios connecting Italian to their broader career goals — writing Italian resumes and cover letters, and researching how language skills intersect with fields from chemistry to biotech. She’s also brought back alumni roundtables, spotlighting graduates working in finance, e-commerce, and international business, to show current students that fluency in Italian is a professional asset, not just a passion project.

Lauren has also become a bridge between Syracuse’s home campus and the Florence program, working closely with the Florence team to strengthen collaboration and bring her own study-abroad experience to bear on student advising — from housing questions to conversations about identity and belonging while abroad.

Looking back, Lauren describes her journey as a series of doors that opened because she said yes — to a study abroad program, a graduate degree she didn’t know existed, a career change, and eventually, a return to the place where it all began. Her advice to current students echoes that same philosophy: seek out opportunities, don’t get swept up in what everyone else is doing, and understand that a semester in Florence can be the first step in a much longer story.

“Every encounter is a door opening,” she says. “Even this little thing that you say yes to opens some door that you have no idea what connection it might make for you.”

Some students study abroad for a semester and go home with good memories. Alessandro Pugliese studied abroad for a semester — then came back twice more, landed an internship with ACF Fiorentina, and eventually went to work for the club’s owner, Rocco Commisso, back in the United States. Today he’s Manager of Public Relations for Mediacom Communications, the Commisso family business, and he still returns to Florence often enough that it’s less “visiting” and more “coming home.”

Alessandro first arrived at Syracuse Florence as a Discovery student in Fall 2015. As Director Sasha Perugini remembers it, it didn’t take long for him to announce exactly what he wanted: “A first-year student told his marketing professor, Simone Anselmi, MBA, that his dream was to work for Fiorentina, and at the time they weren’t even accepting interns.” Anselmi brought the idea to Perugini, and, as she puts it, “together we figured out how to build a strong Capstone project custom made for this opportunity” — the project that would eventually open Fiorentina’s door to him.

One semester wasn’t enough. Alessandro returned in Fall 2017 as a Discovery Program mentor and again in Spring 2019 for his final undergraduate semester, when he received a certificate of merit from Perugini. He’s since become a fixture around the program: he was recently back in Florence for Fiorentina’s 100th anniversary and, while in town, addressed incoming students during Orientation — in many ways, the ultimate Syracuse Florence success story.

Two Internships, One Owner

“The internship with Fiorentina was in Fall 2017, and funny enough, in 2016 I had done an internship with the New York Cosmos, who were playing Hofstra, where my dad teaches,” Alessandro recalled during his recent visit to campus.

After finishing his final semester in Florence, he was reluctant to leave. “I actually had a job offer at another American school. I was close to taking it because I wanted to stay.” He went home for graduation instead — and weeks later, everything changed. “Rocco Commisso bought Fiorentina. He was an Italian American businessman from Calabria, like my family. I had a connection and got my resume to his American company.” The timing lined up almost too well: two years after his Cosmos internship, Commisso had bought that club; two years after his Fiorentina internship, Commisso bought Fiorentina too. “They saw I had worked for both teams he owned. I had studied in Florence, I knew Italian, and I’d been writing about soccer for five or six years already. The stars really aligned.”

Around the same time, Alessandro obtained Italian citizenship through his mother, who was born in Calabria. He started at Mediacom in August 2019, splitting his time between the company’s corporate side and ongoing work for Fiorentina — pulling stats and analysis for Commisso, and eventually helping with the club’s financial side, from player contracts to sponsorships.

When the pandemic slowed things down, he used the pause to start a master’s in Sports Management at Columbia — the same program Commisso had attended, and for which Commisso wrote his recommendation letter. He finished in May 2023 while working at the same time.

One of the hardest chapters came in March 2024, when Fiorentina’s general manager, Joe Barone, passed away. “I came here with Rocco directly on a private jet. We did the camera ardente at Viola Park, where 20,000 fans came to pay their respects.” Afterward, Commisso asked him to stay in Florence through the end of the season. Looking back on it all, Alessandro said simply: “It feels like it’s gone by in the blink of an eye. Time flies.”

It All Started With a Press Credential

Alessandro says none of it would have happened without his time at Syracuse Florence. “My freshman year, I’d go to games sitting in the Curva Fiesole with the Ultras, or sometimes I’d get a press credential because I was writing for different outlets.” He built his school breaks around matches across Europe — Lisbon, Naples, Paris, Germany.

The turning point came when Fiorentina’s press office gave him that credential as a freshman. “I went there, wrote up a story, and got to interview the players. That was when I first realized maybe this could be a career. If I didn’t come here as a freshman, who knows what would have happened.”

A Second Family in Florence

Alessandro lived with the same host family, the Andorlini’s on Via Masaccio, for all three of his semesters — a rarity he credits with changing his life. He still remembers meeting his host parents in Room 13 of the Villa Rossa, and both of his host brothers have since visited him in New York; he attended one brother’s wedding a year and a half ago. He was staying with the family again during this visit.

His connection to Florence runs deeper still. Two years ago, his parents had coffee here with Professor Debora Spini, whose family his father, historian Stanislao Pugliese, has known for years — Stanislao once interviewed Debora’s brother for one of his books, and gave a lecture at Syracuse Florence during Alessandro’s final semester.

Piazza Savonarola remains his favorite area of the city. “After class, I loved going into the square and seeing all the families with the kids hanging out. My host brothers grew up coming here, we’re just two steps away.” He also spent plenty of time in the Syracuse Florence library — “maybe not so much the first semester, but definitely after.”

Learning Italian — and Falling for Italy All Over Again

Despite his Calabrian roots, Alessandro didn’t grow up speaking Italian. His high school didn’t offer the language, and when his grandparents spoke to his parents in dialect, they responded in English. Then he started Italian 101 as a freshman, with some help from his host family: “They’d say, if you don’t try to speak Italian, we’re not going to feed you. That was good motivation.” He went on to complete a dual major in international relations and Italian studies back at the Syracuse home campus.

His family’s ties to Italy run well beyond Calabria, from cousins who’ve settled near Pesaro to a host brother now working as a judge in Sardinia. “It gives us excuses to go to all the different places to see family,” he said.

As for what’s next: Alessandro’s fiancée, whom he’s been with since high school, studied in Milan the same fall he was back in 2017. The two are now planning to marry in Tuscany. It seems fitting that the place that launched his career will also be where he starts the next chapter of his life.

The Whole Argument for Study Abroad

For Director Sasha Perugini, with whom Alessandro has stayed in touch over the years — “not just with me but with the whole program and especially with his homestay family” — his story is more than a memorable one-off.

“I share his story not because it’s unusual, but because it’s the whole argument for study abroad in one case,” she said. “We talk a great deal about global competencies and cross-cultural fluency, buzz words that flatten what actually happens to people when they leave home for a while and dare to confront uncomfortable scenarios. In the end one learns more about themselves.”

Eleven years after a first-year student told his professor he dreamed of working for Fiorentina, that dream — built, in Perugini’s words, “with more conviction than credentials” — has manifested many times over.

Francesca Parotti presented her paper, “ARCUAS: A 3D Printing of Regolith and Bio-based Material for Terraforming,” at NEFES 2026, the 11th International Conference on New Energy and Future Energy Systems, held July 7–10 in Macao, China. The conference brought together 40 delegates from 16 countries and regions to foster communication across fields connected to new energy and future energy systems.

Parotti’s paper appeared in a session on “Smart Grids, Low Carbon Conversion and Functional Energy Materials,” introducing ARCUAS, a project developed with ISIA Firenze design school and Supermateria, a research studio focused on computational design. The name—Acqua/Water, Regolith, Calcium, Urea, Alginate, Sporosarcina Pasteurii—describes a composite material combining Martian or Lunar regolith with a biologically activated binder, aimed at simplifying terraforming for future space exploration.

Reflecting on the work’s significance, Parotti noted, “The ambition to travel in space and establish a permanent human presence on the moon or on Mars is reshaping how design research approaches materials, fabrication, and infrastructure.” The Syracuse Florence community congratulates Professor Parotti on sharing this research on an international stage.

When Bruce Siska, Jason Halter, Matt Lysne, Ed Muehlberg, and Ernesto Teran arrived in Florence for the one-year Master of Architecture program in the fall of 1994, they were five strangers among a class of eleven. By the time they left the following spring, they were something closer to brothers. Thirty years later, that bond hasn’t faded — and when Bruce returned to Villa Rossa last year, it brought a flood of memories that Bruce, Matt, and Ed were happy to share.

“I think we can all agree that our year in Florence was pretty epic, life changing, and beyond memorable,” Bruce said.

An Apartment Lost, and a Friendship Found

The five almost didn’t have a place to live. Within their first days in the city, a young count offered to rent the group an apartment overlooking the Arno. They shook hands and agreed to meet the next morning at Villa Rossa — only to watch, on their way out, four pretty female students from Florida State arrive to tour the same place. Sure enough, the count never showed the next day.

Bruce and Jason spent the next week sleeping on their drafting tables in the M.Arch studio while the search continued. It wasn’t all bad — the two met a slew of memorable people during those homeless days, including a countess who hosted them at her palazzo near Santa Croce. “Toward the end of that week, we had dragged all of our luggage down to Ernesto’s apartment only to find he was out,” Bruce recalled. Defeated, they hauled their bags to Piazza Santa Croce and sat down to watch a group of local boys playing soccer. When one of the younger boys took a ball to the face, his friends picked him up, dusted him off, and sent him right back into the game.

“We had an epiphany at that moment that life wasn’t so bad,” Bruce said. They found an apartment the next day.

Lunch, Foosball, and a Year Planned to the Day

Their professor, Steven Peterson — known to the group simply as “Coach” — spent that year in Florence with his wife, architect Barbara Littenberg, and ran the program with a rhythm the group still remembers fondly. “Coach had the year planned out to the day,” Bruce said. “He planned out the projects we would be working on and designing, then we would travel to places that related to each project.”

Days fell into a routine: mornings in class, lunch together at Taverna degli Artisti around the corner, foosball at Villa Rossa, studio in the afternoon, and — depending on discipline — a pint or two at the Old Stove Pub before heading home, followed by a return to studio to “work” late into the night, a term Bruce admits was often used loosely.

The classes themselves left an impression, too: Giorgio Ciucci’s course was, in Bruce’s words, unreal, and Marcello Fantoni taught a class devoted entirely to the Medici dynasty. Ciucci later invited the group to his home in Rome for aperitivi and snacks — the kind of hospitality, Matt said, that “is real” in Italy in a way that’s hard to describe to people who haven’t experienced it.

When Ed was asked, in a job interview shortly after returning to the U.S., what his favorite part of studying abroad had been, one word came out before he could stop it: “Lunch.”

“I quickly had to elaborate that part of our daily routine was stopping what we were doing and meeting up at Taverna degli Artisti,” Ed said. “It was this routine and focus — enjoying good food and company — that I liked the most about my time in Florence.” He got the job, for what it’s worth.

Lost in Translation

Cross-cultural mishaps were a constant, and the group still keeps a running list of favorites. There was the class with Giorgio Ciucci, in which the students spent several confused minutes trying to understand why he kept insisting “the cows are in the woods” — before realizing he meant chaos, not cattle. There was Matt’s trip to pick up his girlfriend (now wife) in Milan, where he asked Architecture Assistant Carla Fioravanti for a hotel recommendation. She booked him a room at the Hotel Monopoli, and he walked past the sign twice, unable to reconcile her pronunciation (“moh noh polly”) with the board game stamped into his American brain.

Ed learned Italian the hard way, one word at a time. “We had to quickly learn some key Italian words — like sciopero (strike) — to understand why the bus suddenly stopped mid-route, why the grocery stores were randomly closed, why the trains stopped running, and so on,” he said. He also discovered, more slowly than he’d like to admit, that Florentines judge newcomers by their shoes. Once he traded his hiking boots for proper Italian leather, he noticed people on the street actually looking up and saying ciao.

Then there was the train strike that stranded the whole group in Venice, forcing Coach to scramble for last-minute lodging and tickets home — just one more afternoon that became a story they’d tell for decades.

Learning to Live at a Different Speed

For a group of Americans used to checking things off a list, Florence had a way of humbling even the most organized among them. Ed, a committed list-maker, quickly learned that trying to run more than one errand a day was asking for trouble. Between random strikes, unannounced religious holidays, and shops that simply closed when they felt like it, efficiency wasn’t really on the table. “If a store was closed, that just meant you now had time to grab an espresso and sit in the piazza for a while and watch the kids play soccer against some historic church,” he said.

Money brought out a competitive streak. Back when travelers’ checks were still a thing, exchange rates and fees seemed to vary wildly from teller to teller, with no obvious logic. Ed and Matt once tested this directly — walking into the same bank, at the same time, to cash in the same amount of checks — and walked out with different rates. Matt came out ahead. Ed, by his own admission, is still a little bitter about it.

Mail was its own adventure. One spring afternoon, Matt got a call from a friend back home who had just landed in Florence, wanting directions to the apartment. Matt figured he’d been given a heads-up and hadn’t caught it — until dinner, when his friend mentioned the letter he’d sent explaining the visit. That letter, postmarked in Minneapolis in early January, arrived three days after his friend had already come and gone.

What Stayed With Them

All three credit the year with shaping not just their careers, but how they’ve approached life since. Bruce went on to open his own architecture practice. Matt has led study-abroad trips of his own, drawing directly on his Syracuse experience, and still finds himself solving problems today with ideas from studio projects that once annoyed him. Ed says the year taught him to slow down, ask questions, and stay level-headed under pressure — lessons that have mattered more in his personal life than his professional one.

Both Bruce and Matt have been back to Florence since — Bruce twice, once with his own two sons in tow. “Thankfully the city has not changed, aesthetically,” Bruce said. “There is a more relaxed feeling when you know you will be living in the city for a good amount of time… to slow down daily life and appreciate that was one of the things I will always remember.” Matt made a similar pilgrimage in 2016, walking his own family past his old apartment building, the old studio space (now, fittingly, a bar), and back around Villa Rossa.

Three decades on, the group’s five has multiplied. Each of them married and started a family, and by Matt’s count the five friends have turned into twenty between them — give or take, since Bruce “blew it” by having two sons instead of the two-and-two split that would have made the math even neater.

Their advice for today’s students is nearly unanimous: use your Italian, however bad it is. Keep a journal or sketchbook and write down everything, every day — the people, the places, the small stuff — because in a few years, you’ll be glad you did. Don’t rush your days off; you’ll know you’ve truly settled in once you can spend one without an agenda. And, as Ed put it, when something goes wrong, “take a step back and look around, and remember where you are and what you are actually doing. That solves most problems.”

Oh — and skip the tripe.