What was the name of the Dante guy? :O
I’m ashamed to say, I don’t know. Since we didn’t have any classes together and I was an awkward exchange student who didn’t know anyone anyway, he seemed to appear and disappear just beyond the edge of my vision like a eerie woodland creature - a faun, most likely, since I remember people were mostly drinking when he was around. I have vague memories of the same places I described in The Way Out - grand but crumbly rooms filled up with random furniture scavenged here and there - of people moving from the foosball table to the Juliet-like balcony to the beautiful, dilapidated garden - and you could hear this guy’s voice, it called out to all of us like a beacon because of its inherent, fascinating strangeness - the clash between the musical lilt of African-American Vernacular and the familiar sound of the actual words, stuff I marveled at in school - 13th century Italian, for God’s sake. Ma tu perché ritorni a tanta noia? he’d ask, teasing some guy who left the party to go back to his room and study; and Malvagio e rio, that was his judgment of the bland canteen food.
So, well - you hear this kind of stories, and I was lucky enough to witness a few myself - mostly Classicists stranded in Greece who tried quoting Homer in some mountain village to order food and drink, or ask for directions - but I have to admit, I have a particular affection for those who try to understand my maddening culture, and fall in love with it in the process. During my exchange year in Tuscany I met many of them - Japanese writing PhDs on Italian art and Germans learning Italian philosophy - but the Dante guy definitely stood out - I only saw him half a dozen times, but his determined, joyful and carefree use of medieval Italian to discuss party planning, politics and the weather was so striking I wish I had gotten to know him better.
(Then again, I’m a dreamer and an idiot, and I’m happy for my reality to stay a bit uncertain, frayed at the edges - maybe this guy was some kind of immortal, and that’s why he spoke the way he did, just like it’s completely possible my first crush was a music fae and the woman I heard barking under my window last year succumbed to the full moon - who knows. Actual liminal places are great, but I like having liminal places in my memories as well, so I can let the world be a bit more surreal, a bit stranger than it actually is.)
