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Fall 2007
Wooster in Tuscany
A unique living and learning experience created just for Wooster students
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No matter where they studied, class members were never far from the Black
Death. “When you’re living in a city where it happened, confined
by the same walls, and living in the same buildings, you feel it in your bones,” said
Hettinger. “On a beautiful day, you think you’ve left the plague
behind you, because the sun is shining and you’re out for a walk with
your friends, behind one of the oldest hospitals in the western world. And
then someone stops and says, ‘We’re standing on the burial pit.’”
Essential to any study of infectious disease, said Hettinger, is an understanding of the consequences of living in close quarters, and how lines between private and public lives dissolve when the public interest is at stake. The Wooster students, whose living quarters were no different from their Sienese neighbors, learned about the Italian experience by living it.
“In Siena, you know your neighbors’ lives intimately,” said Hettinger. “You know what they are having for dinner, when they eat, when they sleep, who their company is, and what they’re watching on TV. And yet, there is a great respect for privacy. So it was a comical, but a very telling experience when one of our students didn’t pin her clothes on the line tightly enough, and she had to visit the family who owned the balcony below, in order to reclaim her pants.”
As the cocoon of their American life receded, the students submerged themselves in Italian life. Siena is built on three substantial hills, and its narrow streets are almost entirely pedestrian. The Wooster students developed new muscles for negotiating their new city. On their daily shopping trips, they learned that making a connection with the person selling the tomatoes and peppers was as important as what they did with the tomatoes and peppers. They also learned that they could do amazing things with produce that didn’t come from a box, and every evening the students cooked for each other.
“I’d stop by and see gorgeous salads and fruits on their tables,” said Hettinger. “They took great pride in the meals they prepared for one another. They were good to each other in so many ways. I’m terribly impressed by that ‘Wooster thing.’ Now I really understand why Wooster alumni meet other Wooster alumni all over the world. There’s something that connects them very deeply.”
Their fellow-apartment mates were also their partners for the final class project. Each housing group—the Giglio girls, the Castelvecchio crew, and the Sarrocchis—presented a class to their peers. There were few limits on creativity. A section of the 2006 class, for example, organized a role-playing pilgrimage for their classmates, to illustrate the hardships of the medieval pilgrims they had studied. As they visited appointed shrines, the student who was assigned the role of an unwed mother tenderly carried a stuffed animal through the streets of Siena, and the “blind” pilgrim wore a blindfold. “All I said,” remembers Hettinger, “was ‘Don’t let her fall! The trip is almost over—we don’t want to go to the emergency room!’”
On the night before their final day in Siena, the students from the 2007 class told Hettinger they were worried that the friends they had made wouldn’t know what to think, if they suddenly disappeared (as if some disease had wiped them out). And so they made the rounds, saying goodbye to the pizzaiolo who had invented special pizzas just for them, to the grocer who always threw in extra cherries, and to the lady who walked her dog and always said “Buongiorno,” to students who were taking their morning run.
“Far from being the ‘ugly Americans,’ in three weeks, our students became the special ones,” said Hettinger. “‘I did Tuscany’ is not an expression any of our students would use. They learned that travel and learning are all about making human connections.”
