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get a kebab. Then to Malone’s, then to the Red Lion. That’s the track—every Thursday and Saturday night.”
    “How do you know ?” asked a heavy German girl.
    “My friend Cora told me. She did Enteria here last year. She knows everything.”
    “Or maybe we could try something different,” I said. Marcy’s ironclad, self-assured nature irked me. “Perhaps it would be better not to go where all the other students are going.”
    “No, no. Cora told me. Etrusco, Malone’s, Red Lion. That’s the drill.”
    And so we marched, from one mobbed student landmark to the other, ignored by the boys, who, seeing our practical, sturdy army advancing, instantly moved on. I had never witnessed a scene like that: thousands of people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three spilling out into the street. I could barely hear for the chorus of voices ricocheting off the ancient stone—Italian, Spanish, French, English, Chinese. There were regular university girls in little dresses and Birkenstocks, boys in jeans and grubby shirts, and then the Italians themselves, dressed for a fashion runway, the girls walking with practiced ease on heels thin as needles. Our group seemed to pale even further among such plumage. Eventually we migrated to the steps of the cathedral, with at least five hundred other students and foreigners. Every ten minutes or so a thin, dusty man with red eyes would approach us.
    “Ciao, bellas. Spinello? Hash? Zanopane?”
    “What is that last one?” a Belgian girl asked. “Maybe we should get some.”
    Zanopane. The name sounded familiar to me.
    “Don’t even joke,” hissed Marcy. “It’s this new thing, makes you out of your mind, and then it’s like, absolute misery the next day. And then you have to have more, or you’ll absolutely die. No thank you.”
    The Belgian unsuccessfully tossed her frizzy chin-length curls. “It must be quite a high, then. I sort of think I want to try it.”
    “Well, at least wait for the Enteria connection. There’s one every year, Cora says. But I’d stay off it if I were you. Cora told me the worst things about it.”
    After an hour of nodding at Marcy’s readily crystallized opinions of Italian culture, I threw away my plastic cup and walked home, dejected. Surely there had to be more to my year abroad than this pantomime of discovery. In a fit of hope, I wrote an e-mail to Jenny offering help with her Italian, but after a couple of days of hearing nothing, I gave up and decided to make the best of things by joining the other students who chose to go on the Enteria orientation tours of key Grifonian sites.
    Our guide, Loretta, was a plump, damp sort of person, perpetually perspiring even when we were in an air-conditioned room. I could not tell her age, though I guessed her to be ten years older than myself. Her brown eyes widened and snapped as she took us through our historical paces.
    “All right. Ragazzi , look here. Here is an ancient monastery. In the nineteenth century, it became a psychiatric hospital.”
    “Is it still?”
    “Of course!” The march continued. “Here, we come to an extraordinary building, see? Etruscan stones. Please look.” We looked. “Above, this beautiful fresco of the Madonna, con bambino. See? Good. Dai! ”
    Loretta managed to show us little of interest to anyone unconsumed by a passion for the Madonna; by the end of her exhaustive tour of the cathedral, I’d begun to loathe the Blessed Virgin, with her superior stare, her resigned acceptance of her fate to look after a squawking baby she never asked for. Others must have felt the same way, for as the days wore on, the groups became smaller and smaller, until the only people left were myself, a French boy named Pascal, and an insular group of Germans I never got to know. I probably should have fallen off as well to do my own exploring, but then I’d always been almost constitutionally unable to shirk work. So I carried on, and at the end of those long, dull days I