After our evening at the theatre we all retired quite early, I seem to remember. With the prospect of a concert the following night as well as our first outing the following day, there was certainly a lot to look forward to and also to prepare for.
The teachers at the school had been feverishly marking our placement tests so that they could put us in classes the next day. So when we got to school the next morning, everything was in place for us begin putting the money we'd spent to good use.
Gaby and I congregated with Bree and Lynette, and one of Lynette's flatmates. When we met we were all equals, but we were about to be separated into the good, the bad, and the downright hopeless. We had a little idea of each other's ability, but only because we'd chatted about how we'd ended up in Camerino: we'd all studied Italian, but at different levels and in different contexts.
The principal came out and started chanting names. I was called with Lynette's housemate and my housemate Anna. There were others, of course, but only two people that I'd actually spoken with. We were whisked away to the first floor of the school and left in the charge of a woman called Wendy.
Hang on. That doesn't sound very Italian.
She wasn't. Well she was in that she was Italian, but she looked more like Victoria Wood than Sophia Loren: it was uncanny - she had short, curly blonde hair and the slightly-protruding teeth. I took a seat at the back, probably with Anna, excited to start learning how to actually speak Italian.
'Cominciamo con il passato remoto' says Wendy, turning to the blackboard.
We were going to start with the only tense in Italian that only appears in the written language. Not that the passato remoto doesn't have a place in Italian - I believe I used it in my final exam to adopt a high and ironic literary tone when talking condescendingly of something. It was also useful to learn so that I could recognise it when I had to dive into Petrarch and wade through Dante. I mean it wasn't just the heavy stuff that uses it - I found it spread liberally all over I Love Shopping, the Italian translation of Sophie Kinsella's Confessions of a Shopaholic (I had to read it - it was not out of choice).
Anyway, it turned out that the start I had to my language course was an eency-weency bit disappointing. I took the time instead to suss out my classmates. There was a gentleman from the Lebanon (he always referred to it at the Lebanon - I'm never sure why some countries give themselves a definite article, but I don't wish to be politically incorrect). He was quite loud. He had a friend, also from the Lebanon, a nice girl, quiet, but her friend more than made up for her silence. There was a Spanish guy, some Spanish girls - in fact the most represented nation was Spain. Lynette's friend was Croatian, Anna was Belgian, and then there was little old me from England.
At first glance they didn't seem like the kind of people I normally come into contact with and subsequently befriend. I wasn't pre-judging them at all - I fell victim to that once before. Instead I was trying to read them, as I had done with the group in the cafe. This sounds a bit creepy, but it isn't; I was just trying to get the measure of them. We do it all the time subconsciously, I just wasn't that interested in the passato remoto.
Our days were structured thus: one class, break, another class, finito! At break we all met up and found out where each other was, who we were with, and what we'd done. I had thought that at that moment everything would become clear as to where we were placed in terms of levels. I didn't necessarily want to know about everyone else, but I was keen to know where I stood and what level I was aiming at. I established that I was in a class above Bree and Lynette, but I was unsure about Gaby: no problem, if we were doing similar things, we could do our homework together.
The afternoons were ours to do whatever, though the school had organised a number of trips and special classes throughout the month. Our first trip was that afternoon - to the Frasassi Caves; we had just enough time to go back for lunch and get ready to go out again.
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