{"id":14875,"date":"2026-07-27T12:18:32","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T10:18:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/suabroad.syr.edu\/florence\/?p=14875"},"modified":"2026-07-27T15:50:22","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T13:50:22","slug":"alumni-stories-bruce-siska-matt-lysne-and-ed-muehlberg-fall-95-and-spring-96","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/suabroad.syr.edu\/florence\/2026\/07\/27\/alumni-stories-bruce-siska-matt-lysne-and-ed-muehlberg-fall-95-and-spring-96\/","title":{"rendered":"Alumni Stories: Bruce Siska, Matt Lysne, and Ed Muehlberg, Fall ’95 and Spring ’96"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Reunited in 2011<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/strong> Thirty years later, that bond hasn’t faded \u2014 and when Bruce returned to Villa Rossa last year, it brought a flood of memories that Bruce, Matt, and Ed were happy to share.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Bruce then and now<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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

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Field trip to Hadrian’s Villa<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

An Apartment Lost, and a Friendship Found<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2014 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

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Apartment balcony<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Laundry day<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Kitchen time with roommates<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Morning view<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Lunch, Foosball, and a Year Planned to the Day<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Their professor, Steven Peterson \u2014 known to the group simply as “Coach” \u2014 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<\/strong>.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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 \u2014 depending on discipline \u2014 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The classes themselves left an impression, too: Giorgio Ciucci’s course was, in Bruce’s words, unreal<\/strong>, 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Professor Giorgio Ciucci bottom center<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Ed<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“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 \u2014 enjoying good food and company \u2014 that I liked the most about my time in Florence.” He got the job, for what it’s worth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jason<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Lost in Translation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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” \u2014 before realizing he meant chaos, not cattle<\/strong>. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Class dinner<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Matt in the studio<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Ed learned Italian the hard way, one word at a time. “We had to quickly learn some key Italian words \u2014 like sciopero (strike)<\/strong> \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then there was the train strike that stranded the whole group in Venice, forcing Coach to scramble for last-minute lodging and tickets home \u2014 just one more afternoon that became a story they’d tell for decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Class in the field<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Ernesto in Venice<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Learning to Live at a Different Speed<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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<\/strong>,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Last villa garden tour<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2014 walking into the same bank, at the same time, to cash in the same amount of checks \u2014 and walked out with different rates. Matt came out ahead. Ed, by his own admission, is still a little bitter about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Spring break in the Alps<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Stayed With Them<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

All three credit the year with shaping not just their careers, but how they’ve approached life since.<\/strong> 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 \u2014 lessons that have mattered more in his personal life than his professional one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Barbara, Bruce, and Jason<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Walking tour<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Both Bruce and Matt have been back to Florence since \u2014 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<\/strong>.” 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Their advice for today’s students is nearly unanimous: use your Italian, however bad it is<\/strong>. Keep a journal or sketchbook and write down everything, every day \u2014 the people, the places, the small stuff \u2014 because in a few years, you’ll be glad you did. Don’t rush your days off<\/strong>; 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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh \u2014 and skip the tripe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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