The Beginning of the End

            Exam week was stressful in that it was not a week. It was approximately four days: two desperate days of studying and two days of terrifying oral exams. Italians are not a fan of written exams, for some reason. I had to do an oral exam to pass fifth grade in Gaeta as well, but these university exams were much worse. Essentially, in an Italian university exam, you will sit down in front of your professor and he will ask you three or four questions on anything your class has covered throughout the entire semester. The information he may test you on can be anything from your notes from the lecture, the four textbooks you are recommended (but not required) to buy at the beginning of the semester, or any random bit of information that may not have been taught to you but should apparently just be an inherent part of your soul and thus easy enough to remember.

            You will then, to the best of you ability, regurgitate any and all information that you know, trying to recall this information and express it clearly in a foreign language. Oh, also, this is your only grade for the entire class.

And I had two days to study.

            Granted, my study schedule is not something I can complain about, since I did it to myself and I was irresponsibly gallivanting all over Europe in the days that led up to these exams. However, it definitely put a strain on me. Lily and I lived in ItIt again, ignoring all the revelry and happy coffee-drinkers around us as we ploughed through Leopardi, Carducci, and Pascoli’s poems while also trying to understand the symbolism and importance of Fellini’s Book of Dreams and oh yeah—memorizing 1300 years of Italian medieval history. I had also decided it would be good to push myself and take an extra class so as to bring more credits back to Mary Washington. This meant that I was lucky enough to be memorizing the history of every major building in Bologna and would hopefully be able to explain how it contributed to the development of the city, in relation to history.

            Most Italians, however, have months to study for these exams. Typically, classes will begin at the end of January or the beginning of February and they will end towards the end of March or the beginning of April. They will then have until June, July, or August to take the exam (there are multiple exam dates) so they have more time to prepare. Most of our courses ended at the end of April or (in the case of Medieval History) the week before the exam, so we did not have this luxurious amount of time to study. We had those few precious days during which I was in Sicily and London.

            This entire semester, I have been learning in a different way. I’ve been learning by experience and by self-teaching, not by mandatory readings and a crushing workload. As such, it was quite a shock to suddenly find myself back in an environment very similar to the hell-weeks that lead up to final exams at Mary Washington. Stress? What was stress? And why was it suddenly back in my life? The only stress I had been recently experiencing was trying to navigate the Italian railway system. I did not like it. At all. I suppose the good and bad news was that this stress only lasted for those four fateful days.

            My cinema exam was successful—we talked extensively about Fellini and symbolism in La Dolce Vita, along with just a few questions about Pasolini. The interesting thing was that when I sat down to take my exam, it became less of an interview and more of a conversation. My professor and I both talked through the information and it was actually almost enjoyable, seeing as it was like a discussion and not nearly like the Spanish Inquisition I had imagined. I was also thrilled that I managed to talk about these things entirely in Italian without committing too many grammatical heresies.

            Urban History was very similar—a conversation. I also somehow managed to play the sympathy card by informing my professor that I had already had another exam that day and that I had two the next day. Italians, who are used to this three month-long process of taking exams, are scandalized whenever informed of the American custom of squeezing all of our exams into one week. Hearing that I had to take four exams in a concentrated, two-day period seemed to be the most horrific bit of news my professor had been told that week, so he immediately felt bad for me and I think he went a little easier on me than he would have. Which is nice, because the man is a genius and kind of intimidates me (his son, who just graduated high school, will be the ONLY Italian attending MIT in the fall). I got very high grades in both Cinema and Urban History.

            My literature exam was everything I dreaded it to be. I seem incapable of engrossing myself in Italian literature, which I find perpetually ironic, seeing as I am both an English and Italian major. However, I have never liked poetry and it becomes decidedly more difficult when the poems are in a foreign language and written in the 1800’s. We had to memorize the titles and concepts and themes and ideas and basically the SOULS of every poem we had covered the entire semester…which was probably about 30 poems. I may or may not be exaggerating. It felt like 30 poems. Regardless, the point is that this was a nearly impossible task, with all my other courses to study for and my terrible study schedule. So I walked into this exam a little unprepared and struggled in front of our wonderful, soft-spoken professor and I was cringing the entire time. I actually still don’t know my grade on that exam but I’m assuming I passed and will be coming home with the full 15 credits I had set out to get.

            Then…the fateful Medieval History exam. This was terrifying. Sami, Lily and I camped out at the “American Oyster Bar” all afternoon the day of the exam, flipping through pages upon pages of notes and struggling to get the timeline of the fall of the Roman Empire straight. When it came time to start walking over to our professor’s office, we kept our notebooks and textbooks out as we walked, avoiding being hit by traffic and desperately trying to memorize last-minute facts. All three of us were at a disadvantage here: Sami (for whatever her reasons) hadn’t been to class in about two months, Lily had missed nearly a month of class because she had had visitors and then had gotten very sick, and I had missed quite a bit of class towards the end of the semester because of all of my travels. Thus, we weren’t sure what information we had actually missed out on in all those afternoons we had failed to attend Merlino’s course.

            We got to Merlino’s office (whose real name is Paolo Pirillo) and he informed us that he needed witnesses to the exam, so we all had to stay in there. This was quite possibly the most uncomfortable thing that Merlino could have done to us: forcing us to all be in the same room as we listened to the others take their exams. It was awful and yet somehow, we made it through. My exam is a blur now. I know that he asked me about the events that led to the fall of the Roman Empire and I gave a pretty decent answer. I was also very distracted by the taxidermy hawk that was looking at me from the table behind Merlino, which did not help with my frayed nerves. I know that he asked me two other questions, which I remember answering concisely and I had gotten nods of approval, which thrilled me. Merlino then asked me a question about the culture of the merchant class during the medieval ages and I gave him a thoroughly exhaustive list of everything the merchants got up to in those days—from family culture to their wealth and power in the cities. He still didn’t appear satisfied. Scrunching up his face, he shook his head and kept repeating, “No, the culture. The culture.”

            I fumbled for a few moments, trying to think back on what small piece of culture I could have possibly missed in the ten-minute monologue that I had already delivered on medieval merchant culture. I took a wild guess and said, “Well, they could read—”; hoping that by telling my professor that merchants were literate would be a good enough answer. Merlino’s eyes lit up. “Yes! Yes! What? What did they read?” Thank you, Professor Schneider of Mary Washington, for forcing me to study Erotic Literature in Italian culture, because you saved me. I threw out two names haphazardly (which, if you know anything about Italian culture, you know that they are actually not haphazard names at all and are actual the basis for everything): “Dante and Petrarca?” Merlin clapped his hands together, nodded, and said si very enthusiastically. And thus concluded my medieval history exam. All the man wanted to know was what books the merchants had on their nightstands for bedtime reading....in addition to the role of communes in the history of Italy and how the role of the lord developed with the sudden growth of castles through the Holy Roman Empire 

            After that heinous experience, Sami and Lily and I went directly to the Irish Pub (ironically, one of the more popular bars in the city) and were there until it was time for apperitivi with the rest of our program and our professors. Our entire semester had led up to these exams and they were finally, miraculously, over. I was a little sad, though. Not about the end of the exams, but certainly the end of the classes. I had really enjoyed the cultural experience of Medieval History and everything I had learned from Urban History. Literature had been…well, a challenge, but Cinema I had always enjoyed—for both the course content, and also the Facebook conversations that would be going on behind our computer screens as we “took notes” on the fifth documentary we had watched on Pasolini’s death. It was strange to think that I would never see these professors again in my lifetime and would never be in a classroom again, surrounded only by Italians. And despite my nervousness for the exams, I am actually really proud of myself for having not only gotten through them, but for having gotten good grades in them as well. It's not easy taking all courses in Italian...and these exams were like the final test to see if we had truly learned not only the coursework, but also the language. I feel more accomplished for being able to explain the fall of the Roman Empire in Italian than I do for taking a written exam back home. I think that is one of the things that I will miss the most when being away from Italy: that feeling of accomplishment after having succeeded in doing something simple, but which is actually quite impressive, having completed it in a foreign language. 

            Also, the night ended on a high note.  I succeeded in getting a picture with the wonderful Professor Ivan, so all is right in the world. 

© Copyright Danielle DeSimone. 2013.