Jim Chapman

I once checked a box on a university application and was selected for a studies abroad program in Italy to study art. In a whirlwind, I got shots and a passport, and then boarded a jet.

I'd barely crossed the county line before. I figured I'd better stock up on cigarettes and soap, since I didn't know what kind of people they had "over there."

A woman I knew who'd once been "overseas" advised me about pretty much everyone outside of Georgia: "They'll pick your pockets clean in a heartbeat." Armed with this advice, cigarettes and soap, I felt prepared.

They set us up in an old stone monastery for three months in the hillside town of Cortona. There were no monks around, but there was a caretaker who locked the doors and gate quite early, making night owls like me resort to climbing the drainpipe to get into the upper window.

The window was the only way in besides the gate. If you slipped, it was a fairly long drop to the cobblestone. Those who didn't make it usually lay mumbling on the ground until morning.

Many in the program were serious scholars, exploring Etruscan tombs and marble cherubs with vigor. Some seemed genuinely puzzled when I croaked that I was from "Lula." They'd nod, and then go back to studying.

I was quickly painted as the token rube, which, I felt, was a fair assessment.

Shouting, "Hey! There's that crooked building!" at the Tower of Pisa didn't help my case for being a continental sort. The situation was not helped by my beer swilling and crow calls, although it did attract a like-minded group of rabble-rousers.

We were not scholar material, we found. We were far more tuned to climbing drainpipes and horselaughs under bistro awnings.

The scholars didn't expect much from us, especially after the night a fellow struck a match and, as a gag, held it to a woman's bushy hairdo, which flamed up and left half of her head in balled-up smoking nubs.

Many felt the sobbing and smell of burned hair was a low ebb in the program's history.

A fellow rube, from South Georgia, brought along two big duffle bags of Levi jeans to sell on the "black market," thinking he'd make a killing. He was surprised to learn jeans were widely available.

He also was surprised to learn that chocolate bars did not magically attract dates as advised by his uncle, who'd been in "It-lee" during the "Big One."

I never got my pockets picked in "It-lee," but then again, I never had anything of value in them.

But I picked up one fact: It's awfully tough to make a scholar out of a rube.

Back then, I assumed you could walk any fool through, say, a marble colonnade, and by osmosis, he would acquire a certain stately wisdom rooted in ancient ways.

Yes, he may fire up a Marlboro, but he would now do so with a worldly knowledge as sturdy and finely-fluted as a Roman column.

And yet, even rubes do take something from a place (in addition to the hotel towels.)

We wandered the countryside and painted pictures, meeting farmers and shopkeepers. We rode trains through midnight fields framed by olive trees. We sketched in the Roman ruins, where Caesars once walked across crushed rose petal paths.

We'd been overseas, by Ned.

Jim Chapman is a syndicated columnist based in Gainesville. E-mail: jim@vardeman.com.

Originally published Sunday, June 25, 2006