The Italian Football Bar (Erasmus Prize Essay)

This was the dull, dim, plastic-looking Italian bar I had been looking for in Pisa. Passing the fruit machines on my left, I quickly moved through to a tall, square smoky room crowded with the frowning faces of old men. Each was different: one with a sagging frame and a fierce expression; another huge but with tiny little eyes; another lean with slick gray hair and an icy glare. They were dotted around on white plastic seats in an arrangement that lent its focus to the big screen showing football against the wall. Apart from these decorations the room was, unlike the old men’s’ faces, featureless, cold indeed with its hard surfaces and tall ceiling. My appearance distracted the watchers. I had suddenly stolen the old men’s attention from the green screen. Without daring to squeak a word in Italian, I found a plastic chair and scrambled awkwardly through the men to a squashed spot by the wall. Still the wrinkled, frowning faces were bent on me, awaiting it seemed some utterance that would restore their concentration back onto the green screen. I shuffled, murmured something, lit-up a cigarette even. But I didn’t utter. Until: “Ragazzino, chi e` la tua squadra?” – “little boy, who is your team?” Of all questions, the huge man with the little eyes had posed the easiest. “Liverpool” I replied.

What I hadn’t realized was how significant this little autumn episode had been. This first word was the platform upon which I found the ability for self-expression in Italian. Although the hoarse voices of the old men were hard to interpret (and altogether intimidating), I managed to squeal out some Italian as my visits to the bar in Pisa became increasingly regular. And the more I talked to these gruff but kind-hearted men – even hurling outrage at the green screen from time to time; “Dio Boia!” – the more my fear of Italian-speaking was banished. I was eking out ways of self-expression. It was encouraging; if I could make conversation with old-men, who made no attempt to soften their rushed, slurry accents on my behalf, then any substantial linguistic concerns of my own would seem to have no grounds. The football bar became therefore a vehicle that drove me towards not just a greater confidence in my own language speaking, but also to an improved capacity to embrace all that the Erasmus year in Pisa offered – people, culture and study.

But what a brutal repression a foreign student can suffer in the first few months! Communication with other people has, hitherto, been taken for granted. To this end little is said before the Erasmus year, no warnings about the solitude which may be forthcoming. The inability to express oneself comes about from both a lack of courage and, quite simply, of vocabulary. Put into literary terms, this was the uncomfortable cold, useless feeling I had upon first entering the football bar.

Even when a reasonable grasp of the language is established, you can feel trapped in a sort of linguistic claustrophobia. Initially there is a simple lack of vocabulary to explain yourself, but its just as cruel when you cannot choose the right words, rendering your speech bland and short of poignancy. It is often too much of an ordeal to find the suitable words to express a fleeting thought, and when you’re finally ready the moment has passed. This all amounts to the suffocation of your personality that condemns you into a state of apathetic loneliness. This squeeze upon self-expression can strangle the aspirations of an Erasmus student, personal and academic. Certainly in my opening months in Pisa I showed little desire to involve myself in university life, the city itself or even with my flat mates. Instead I was lonely and apathetic, which while an evident failing of my own might also be one which some Erasmus students can sympathize with.

Initially my life in Pisa was orientated around the bar, university and my apartment - three theatres of Italian-speaking. My flat was very close to the river Arno that comes from Florence and winds its way through the town. This was a good central position – the river is the focal point of the city, rather than the tower which lies hopelessly sidelined on the outskirts. In the apartment I had German flat mates, three girls, and in the course of my first month in Pisa they had multiplied – new German girls kept appearing at such a rate they may as well have been asexually reproducing. Across the Ponte di Mezzo was the History Department of the University, tucked away down a narrow street off Piazza Dante, a student haven and one of the city’s biggest squares with a huge library. To get to the football bar I would head along the river towards the Apuan Alps looming in the background.

My state of linguistic paralysis – it seems no exaggeration to call it so –was keenly felt in all three theatres. The kitchen could be a frightening place – multiplying German girls were chattering freely in their mother tongue. Even when the conversation turned to Italian I was hardly more enthusiastic about talking, reserving my breath for short, uncomplicated lines. The classroom was equally uncomfortable. It seemed very unlikely that I could draw much from lessons on early modern Russian history in Italian. To participate in class discussion was certainly out my range given the difficult vocabulary and my stammering, blundering grammatical formations – in summary the great linguistic fear. At least here I could conceal myself amongst the students.

The bar was a daunting place too, littered with rough-edged Italian men as it was. But it was different to the apartment or University for this was a place where I could express myself through the game I loved, football, with people who shared my passion. Throughout the Erasmus year I was known to the old men as ‘Liverpool’. I caught their notice mostly for bouncing off the bar’s walls after my team had won. This admittedly did not constitute verbal expression, but my paralysis was about to break. Very soon I was engaging in full-blooded football debate, armed with a broad range of terminology from Italy’s most popular newspaper, the ‘Gazzetta Dello Sport’, forty pink pictures of sports news every day. Now I was discussing the politics of Italian football, and why the coach of the national team needed to introduce a greater continuity regarding team selection. The effect on the rest of my life was knock-on. Back in the kitchen I started to walk in and out of conversations with ease, even making the German girls, who had at last ceased to multiply, giggle with a bit of dry, Italian-translated English humour. At university I was an active member of the class, arguing that although ‘Pietro Il Grande’ showed a progressive, modernistic attitude with regard to Russian foreign policy he fell woefully short on the domestic front.

The whole Pisa world seemed to open up for me as a result of my new-found linguistic confidence. The city itself I embraced with a growing affection. I spent many hours in a particular spot beside the Arno, began friendly discussions with my regular newspaperman, and with the whole staff at my favourite café. On Wednesday evenings we went to a live jazz bar oddly concealed behind black doors by a massive water pump. On a friend’s birthday we went to the Teatro Verdi to see a curious dance interpretation of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s paintings. All these developments came about because of my broken paralysis. That is the increasing ease with which I spoke Italian, or more accurately the decreasing fear I felt towards speaking it. The ultimate reward came in the final few months when I became close friends with an Italian student.

On June 16th I helped the Italians celebrate the patron saint of Pisa, San Ranieri. Along the Arno all artificial lights were extinguished, replaced instead by tens of thousands of candles held in small canisters. The effect was a brilliant flickering of an orange-yellow glow across the surface of the river. It’s called ‘La Luminara’ – ‘The Lighting’. Thousands of people invaded the streets to see it. At midnight there was climatic boom of fireworks, and thereafter each of Pisa’s main squares became swamped by a carnival atmosphere. Late in the night we were perched along the Ponte di Mezzo, looking down the river, and I suddenly became aware of the sagging frame of a man standing next to me. It was indeed the character from the football bar. Given the masses on the streets this really was unlikely. I turned to him and we made football chat for a while. In that moment, coming as it did just one month before I left Pisa, it seemed a circle was being drawn around my Erasmus Year. He was groaning about how AC Milan should have beaten Liverpool, but he might have been saying: “Ok, here we are now in summertime, you are having fun with your friends and speaking Italian very well. But don’t forget where it all began in autumn in a football bar with a bunch of oldies like me”. I have not forgotten.