I distinctly remember one class trip in my sophomore year of high school to the Museum of Natural History in New York City. It was a somewhat unofficial trip since we were instructed to go on our own free time, but overall it is the perfect example of how class trips in high school typically work. We were given a worksheet about four pages long that had questions pertaining to the rock, metals, and space exhibits within the museum. Our task: write down all the information you can find in the museum that answers the eighty questions given. Like the good students we were, we went to these exhibits, found the answers for our class, and ignored all the other exhibits that weren’t on the list, even though I desperately wanted to go to the dinosaur room.
The trip to Tuscany was a departure from this class trip and all the other class trips that I took in my high school years. While we had the organized tours of palaces and churches to give us insight on how citizenship worked in the past, we also had a considerable amount of freedom to wander, get lost, and define modern day Tuscan citizenship for ourselves. Honestly, being an extremely structured person, I was apprehensive about walking around for hours in a town that I had never heard of before. Would anyone speak English? Would they understand the little amount that I could say in Italian? Would I miss the entire point of the trip because I wasn’t given a four page list of questions to answer?
Despite these fears, I believe that I discovered the reason why our trip was organized in such a way. Upon entering each town, I told myself that I would speak with at least one local citizen in Italian. I fulfilled this challenge to myself, and, in the process, I discovered a lot about the characteristics of Italian citizenship, particularly about the pride they have in their towns. Every person that I came in contact with on the trip was relaxed and communicative. It seemed as though there were two, older, Italian men at the entrance of every Tuscan town that we visited. It’s as if they were sitting there, waiting for us to arrive with a welcome and a smile. They always had a comment on the large number of tourists that emerged from our tour bus, but it wasn’t a sarcastic or aggravated comment. These men smiled at the number of people that would get to experience the place they had lived all their lives. Through their smiles, I felt as though I was being embraced by the city itself.
My most memorable conversation occurred on the last day of our trip in Montalcino. A group of us stopped in a small shop near the castle that sold traditional souvenir items. After finding a hand-painted Christmas ornament, I was simply waiting for the others to make a purchase, so I decided to start up a conversation with the old woman who owned the shop. I opened with a simple question about the weather, asking if it was always so hot in October. I received the answer I wanted, but the girls were still shopping. I pressed on, reaching into my mind for other Italian phrases I knew by heart. I landed upon “Di dove sei?” Her eyes lit up with the question, as she answered “Montalcino, sempre Montalcino.” I didn’t even have time to ask a follow up question before she started telling me about the city. She said it was very small and that she knew most of the residents. When she was younger, she would take trips with her friends to Sienna for the nightlife. She proceeded to ask me where I am from. When I said New York City, her mouth dropped. “Città molto grande,” she said, awaiting my response. I told her as much as I could in my broken Italian, explaining the Christmas lights, the crowds, and the noise. New York was magical for her, a place she had only seen in the movies. Yet, she said she had no desire to go visit. She had everything she needed in Montalcino – her family, friends, business. Why would she leave a place that had so much to offer?
This experience taught me a lot about Tuscan citizenship. She furthered my perception that Tuscans in smaller towns were receptive to tourists by not only answering my questions – and dealing with my broken Italian – but also by asking me questions about my life. This showed me that she is truly interested in her customers and not just obliging them for sales. I also picked up on the pride and loyalty these citizens hold for their towns. I could see a deep love for her town in the way she recounted her youth experiences; her eyes shone, and her hand motions increased. She bragged about the longevity of her store and where she got her products. Most importantly, she refused to abandon her town for the city that most of the world would kill to live in. This simultaneous acknowledgment of the wonder of New York and the lack of desire to visit really imprinted me with the notion that Montalcino must be something special.
In leaving behind my high school checklists and need for structure, I found a connection to a formerly unknown place. When I think of Montalcino now, I feel warmth and acceptance. I see a familiar face, one that reminds me of my own grandmother. Citizenship encompasses more than the textbook definition that you get in a middle school government class. It goes beyond the organizational structure of the government and the economy. This trip has taught me that politics and economics shape the citizens, but the citizens shape the atmosphere. It is through the values the individual people portray that one gets a true sense for the city and what its founders hoped to accomplish.