At the crack of 11 o’clock in the morning, a 19-year-old boy leans against the wall of a classroom in Florence and yawns ostentatiously. A trio of pretty girls sashay past in jewelled flip-flops and camisole tops, flicking their long hair and adjusting the sunglasses on their head. Everyone looks a little the worse for wear. Down the corridor, a class is being brought to a close in loud, rapid Italian. Another day is dawning at the British Institute of Florence, and it is a little too bright for some.
Founded by a group of Anglo-Italian enthusiasts in 1917, the Institute’s avowed role is “to promote a cultural exchange between England and Italy”. What this mainly translates as is teaching English to Florentines, and Italian and history of art to English people. It would be easy, but unfair, to dismiss it as a sort of 21st- century finishing school for young, middle-class idlers. But word-of-mouth recommendation perpetuates similar types of student, especially during summer months (including, it has to be said, me when I was 19). So this year, as another influx of 19-year-olds pitches up post-exams, the corridors will be awash with the same middle-class accents, Tiffany ID bracelets, large hoop earrings and old friends from boarding school as ever.
According to a study earlier this year for the Department for Education and Skills, more and more young people are taking gap years: but the Institute has to compete against the fact that they can choose to spend them in increasingly adventurous and far-flung ways. However, the study also found that employers place a high value on the experiences and skills that can be gained on a well-spent gap year – and the Institute is in the winning position of being able to offer both. And they do it well: generations of parents would be unlikely to carry on forking out for their daughters’ Florence sojourns if all they were going home with was a fluent command of a cocktail list and a crush on a waiter.
“Why am I learning Italian?” queries Will Lander, yawning again. “Dunno. S’useful. Sounds nice.” An Oxford history undergraduate, Will spent the evening partying with friends of friends from London, who are doing the “Cecil art course… Cecil something… can’t remember the full name. But I met up with them anyway. Bit of a late one. Didn’t get much sleep.”
Being here is better than he imagined. He’s sharing a flat with four people, arranged by the Institute. When not at his three hours of classes a day, he spends much of his time sleeping. Will pitched his month-long trip to Florence to his parents as educational, so they paid. He stresses that he is going to “properly try” to learn Italian, as they will be none too pleased if he returns speaking not a word.
Advertisement
Julia Bromage, Sarah Pac-Balzan and Anna Smedvig, all 20, were friends at Wycombe Abbey but separated for university. They thought coming to the Institute would be a good way to meet up again, and Julia’s mother told her she had to spend her holiday productively. “You can wander round looking at lots of stuff but not really doing anything…” says Sarah. Being at the Institute, they agree, means they can wander, but with purpose. All three have signed up for Beginners’ Italian, History of Art and Cookery; as has Marie-Claire Blake, 22, with whom they have become friends since being allocated rooms in the same flat. Marie-Claire, on a post-university gap year, liked the idea of actually living in the city and worked for six months to save up half of the £1,000 cost. Her aunt chipped in the rest.
Today, the foursome are having their inaugural Beginners’ Italian class with teacher Alba Forzoni. Wearing flip-flops, the better to show off her toe-rings and immaculate Rouge Noir pedicure, Alba is expressing considerable doubt, born of many years’ experience at the Institute, that her 11 female and one male students will manage to arrive on time for their 9am class over the coming weeks.
Alba is undoubtedly extremely good at what she does – adept, enthusiastic and endlessly patient – and, like the Institute itself, ever so slightly eccentric. The Institute’s director, Vanessa Hall-Smith, 54, appears to be a slightly hippyish 54-year-old teacher, but was actually a high-flying City lawyer in London before jacking it in to start this job in January. “I suppose,” she agrees, “that we are mildly eccentric here. I think we quite like it that way.”
Later, Alba progresses seamlessly from pronto and grazie with the beginners to fluent conversations on favourite writers with the five-strong advanced class. This includes Richard Mason, the ex-singer of an indie band from Edinburgh who decided, at the age of 30, that he should find something to do with more “substance”. He is in Florence to improve his Italian, with a view to getting a job teaching English in Italy. He thinks it only polite to learn the language of the country in which he hopes to live, and the Edinburgh language school where he has studied for the past year helpfully awarded him a scholarship to attend the Institute for a month.
Richard doubts that he is a typical Institute student. He is right. He is, for a start, fully dressed, rather than in the state of contrived déshabillé of the girls, while any fiddling he does with his hair is mostly to keep it out of his eyes. He generally uses his (pink, Bono-style) sunglasses to shade his eyes rather than the top of his head, and removes them altogether indoors. He owns a large Italian dictionary, has a pretty good grasp of what’s in it and is here, mainly, to learn. He thinks the majority of his fellow students are “kids straight out of school, sent by their parents to culture them”. And while all of Alba’s advanced students have to deliver a talk on a topic of their choice to the rest of the class, only Richard sits on a desk, swings his legs and talks blithely, in immaculate Scottish-accented Italian, about how sex alleviates stress but love creates it. Alba nearly chokes on her coffee.
Advertisement
At the other end of the spectrum are 16-year-old friends Alice Streatfield and Ellie Watson, from London. They didn’t know what to do with the summer, friends recommended the Institute and here they are. Ellie had expected a broader range of people. “Not all so… posh,” says Alice. “That makes them the same as us, but it’s different from London because there, there’s so many completely different sorts of people. So it’s kind of strange here. It’s a bit like my old boarding school.”
For Hall-Smith, that’s pretty much what it is: she lives in a flat across the corridor from the library, with two cats. The divorced mother of two daughters, she applied for the job, which she saw advertised in The Times, not because she thought she could do it, but because she thought it sounded lovely. She has not been disappointed.
“For some people, it’s the fulfilment of a dream, to come and study in Florence. I think the world today is such a frightening place, but culture has a very civilising influence. I hope that by learning about other cultures, and by deepening their knowledge of art, it leads to an appreciation and understanding of universal values. I think that’s terribly important and I believe in it very, very strongly. You can only benefit from learning about other people, living with other people and learning another language.” She also points out that this is true at any age – the Institute’s demographic ranges from 15 to 70.
What her Institute offers is a complete service: they will liaise with you (in English), take your child, sort out their housing, ask questions if they disappear, surround them with similar people and teach them something useful. This summer, a month-long history of art course is €525; Italian courses start at €630 and, depending on level, entail around ten hours a week in the classroom. There are other courses on everything from cookery to drawing, sculpture and frescoes. Factor in accommodation – a shared flat costs at least €550 a month – and most students are looking at a starting price of at least €1,200 (£800), depending on where and how they live and what they study, and not including food or going out.
In return, they learn Italian from Italians in Italy; they get to visit in situ the art they studied earlier in the classroom; and they have fun in a glorious city. Francesca Boni, 50, co- ordinator of the Italian department, has taught at the Institute since 1988. She believes her 99 per cent English-speaking students are attracted because it sounds “steady, solid, historical and has ‘British’ in the name”. “They like to have fun and they should have fun, but I have amazingly serious students, too, very young, very focused.”
Advertisement
Thomas House is somewhere between the two. Reading ancient history at Durham, Thomas, 20, decided to write his dissertation on the triumph of love in Renaissance art, a subject of which he was entirely ignorant. So, as the day cools and the crowds thin, he finds himself on the steps of the Medici church of San Lorenzo for the evening’s history of art lecture. His story is the same as everyone else’s: a friend went to the Institute last year, “had a brilliant time and met lots of jolly people, so here I am. So far there’s been quite a lot of going out, quite a lot of recovering from hangovers. There’s not been much sleeping done in Florence yet.”
Coco Seagroatt, meanwhile, is on a year out between St Mary’s, Ascot and Leeds University. She spent the skiing season working in a bar in Meribel and has been in Italy for two and a half months. Several of Coco’s friends are also in Florence. “Everywhere has the most incredible cocktails. And shopping’s cheap. We have a field day. But it’s not just about shopping and going out and getting drunk the whole time – it’s unbelievably beautiful.”
Which pretty much sums it up. “If you’re coming as a gap-year student,” says Hall-Smith, “this might be the first time you’ve ever been in a different country on your own. That’s going to be a formative experience. I think most parents are quite pleased if their children come here because there is a lot to learn, and I think that most people who come here have a very good time.”
The British Institute, Palazzo Strozzino, Piazza Strozzi, 2, 50123 Florence (39 055 2677 8200; www.britishinstitute.it)