From a Class Trip to Italy, a He-Saw, She-Saw Story

Editor’s note: Last spring, 29 students and 18 chaperons from Yorktown High School in Arlington, Va., flew to Italy for a 10-day tour of Venice, Florence and Rome. Nick Summers, a sophomore, and his mother, K.C. Summers, the travel editor of the Washington Post, both pictured on Page L1, took notes and came back with very different stories. Excerpts follow:

K.C.: So I signed up to go on Nick’s class trip. Of course, I cleared it with him. Nick said it was fine as long as I didn’t expect him to, like, sit next to me on the plane or anything. Or on the tour bus. Or in restaurants. Or walk next to him in museums. Or socialize during the evenings.

NICK: Actually, I had no problem with Mom coming along. She would have plenty of other parents to play with. I didn’t expect to see much of her anyway because my friends and I had plans for our free time. This wasn’t just a study trip; it was our spring break too.

K.C.: The kids were loaded with the essentials: Discmans, Game Boys and, in one boy’s case, 22 extra AA batteries. The kids looked adorable, I thought, as I reflected on my one and only class trip, a cruise down the Potomac. These guys, by contrast, were jetting to Italy. I hoped they appreciated how lucky they were.

Oh, God. I was doing it already.

NICK: As soon as we landed in Italy, I knew we hadn’t left everything behind: Our humongous tour bus waited at the Milan airport. All buses are the same, from the narrow aisles to the strict social hierarchy, and we would become painfully well acquainted with this one by the end of our trip. Our time on the bus was a blur, punctuated with CDs, sleep and lunacy. As we drove from Milan to Venice, two friends orchestrated an elaborate war between rival brands of Italian Gummi Bears and mournfully ate the casualties.

Our first cultural revelation: All Gummi Bears taste the same.

K.C.: Within one day, the bus hierarchy was firmly in place. Sitting up front was our Italian tour guide, the lovely Rafaella with the big brown eyes, who had met us at the Milan airport. She was effortlessly chic in that maddening way European women seem born with. (Is it the scarves? The hair? The complete absence of running shoes in their wardrobes?)

My fellow parent chaperons and I made up the deadly middle section, where no self-respecting adolescent would be caught. They were all in the back, ignoring us. I felt somewhat left out, not one of the “in crowd” up front and not part of the cool section in back. Here I am, 48 years old and worrying about where to sit on the bus.

NICK: The trip was called “The Art of Italy.” We’d been studying this stuff, and now we were going to see the real thing. Our guide was my European history teacher, Albert Van Thournout, or VT, as he is called. VT is like a combination of Don Rickles and Hannibal Lecter, with a bit of the absent-minded professor thrown in.

He knows everything about everything, so I figured he’d be a good guide.

Hey, we were supposed to be in Venice, so why were we staying in a town called Lido di Jesolo? I was disappointed. We were obviously nowhere near the city center. I had expected that our lodgings would be right in the middle of Venice, Florence and Rome.

Then it struck me: I was whining about being a few miles from Venice on a trip to Italy that my parents were paying for. Note to self: Shut up.

My three roommates and I checked out our hotel room. It was barely bigger than the two beds and cot that had been pushed against each other and had transformed the room into a giant mattress. The bathroom was also small. Two or three feet separated the sink and toilet. I liked the utilitarianism: You could shower, shave and urinate at the same time.

K.C.: I now discovered there were two trips going on--the official daytime tour, and an after-hours one that I could never penetrate. Every morning when we met for breakfast, I’d hear cryptic references to the night before.

This became immediately apparent at our first stop, Lido di Jesolo, a funky little town on the Adriatic coast 20 miles north of Venice. I was exhausted and jet-lagged, so after dinner I headed to my room.

While I was nodding off, the kids celebrated their arrival in Italy with an impromptu walking tour of the town by moonlight. The next night, after a full day of sightseeing and museum-going in Venice, they were at it again: one group to the local disco and another to the seashore, where they stripped to their boxers and plunged into the Adriatic. At least this is what I’m told. I was asleep.

NICK: Sleep is overrated. Our first night in Jesolo, we took a walk and spent 20 minutes behind a seaside hotel, waiting for an outdoor digital clock to make the daylight savings jump from 11:59 p.m. to 1 a.m. The crossover never came, but nobody cared. It set the tone for the entire trip: No matter how stupid something was, it was still special because we were in Italy. You can sleep anywhere any time.

K.C.: We spent one morning in the Piazza San Marco, communing with the pigeons and touring St. Mark’s and the Doges’ Palace.

Rafaella hooked us up with another Italian guide, the stylish and soulful Piero, who seemed far too cool to be leading a bunch of tourists. He confided that he was really an actor; this was his day job. He led us through the lavishly painted rooms of the palace, past Tintorettos and trompe l’oeil floors. I was overwhelmed by the beauty and history and turned to a couple of the kids for their reactions.

Martin: I’m wondering if I can get my hair like Piero’s.

Josh: Man, he’s in style, isn’t he? I want to come here for a year to learn how to be suave.

NICK: We spent most of one day in Venice in small groups, walking around, trying to make sense of the city’s circuitous canals and paths. We took a gondola ride, which was peaceful until I had to distract Mom from the condoms floating by. (Eventually she did notice and called the entire boat’s attention to them.)

I also discovered the food. Our hotel meals had basically sucked, but now we had lunch at a restaurant overlooking the Grand Canal. My first forkful of fresh Venetian ravioli was like a culinary LSD trip. At that moment, I would have been content to stay in that chair, nibbling on Caesar salads and watching gondolas glide by, for the rest of the trip.

VT had built Florence up in our minds all year: the birthplace of the Renaissance, home to Dante, Boccaccio and Michelangelo. I had high expectations, and I wasn’t disappointed. Florence was my favorite of the cities we visited, for two reasons: the Duomo and Michelangelo’s statue of David.

The Duomo, also called the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, dominates the Florentine skyline. The first time I saw it up close, I couldn’t believe it. I’d never seen anything of that scale on a city street.

The David statue is awesome. There are actually two Davids in Florence: the fake outdoor one in the Piazza della Signoria, where people don’t mind if it gets pummeled by pigeon droppings and eaten by pollution, and the real one in the Galleria dell’Accademia.

Standing in front of the real statue, I felt this need to discuss it, and VT materialized by my side. Six of us were there, and for an hour we talked about David’s symbolism.

K.C.: Even better than seeing the Duomo was watching the faces of the kids as they rounded that street corner and caught sight of the ornate 15th century cathedral and its massive dome. The church is so huge, its psychedelic marble facade so outrageous that it stopped them in their tracks. Of all my memories of the trip, that is my favorite.

As we strolled through Florence that night, VT was the nucleus of a human solar system, groups of animated kids circling him wherever he went. Outside the Uffizi, spotting a bust of Machiavelli (apparently his favorite Renaissance figure), VT sighed happily. “Ah, Machiavelli the misunderstood! Thank you, Niccolo, for leading me and my students into wisdom!”

(I am not making up this quote.)

VT and the kids were suddenly running back and forth, pointing out busts of Dante, Vespucci, Michelangelo, Leonardo and other Florentine hotshots. Now I understood why his class was so popular. You can’t fake this kind of enthusiasm.

NICK: I had no concept of how old the Roman Colosseum is. While I was trying to figure out how the ancient Romans could hold mock sea battles here, I noticed a crowd gathering on the second floor. A fight? A distraught tourist threatening to jump? No, it was VT giving an impromptu speech on the history of the Colosseum.

When I arrived, he was explaining that history has exaggerated the number of Christians sent to battle lions centuries ago. If he’d given this talk back at Yorktown, most of the kids would have tuned him out after five minutes--but here, every student paid attention.

K.C.: We joined the throngs at St. Peter’s, where we dutifully shuffled past the Pieta. The statue was too far away and the basilica too crowded to admire Michelangelo’s masterpiece properly.

NICK: Our Rome hotel was (as usual) nowhere near the happening part of the city, but the lobby had a bar and a small dance floor. In the corner, a synthesizer played disco-karaoke remixes of American Top 40 hits, plus an assortment of disco “classics.” After 15 minutes, almost everyone was dancing.

Just when things had begun to die down, someone bellowed, “Vee-Tee!” There was our esteemed European history teacher, getting down in the middle of a circle of shouting students. He had the best moves on the floor that night, which is one more reason that he is the coolest short, bald, sixtysomething history teacher I know.

K.C.: On one of the last jaunts of the trip, we drove outside Rome to Tivoli to visit the Villa d’Este, a beautiful example of 16th century excess. It’s known for its lavish, manicured gardens and whimsical fountains, but I was most taken with its setting, overlooking terra-cotta roofs, rolling hills and cypress trees.

Wandering around the grounds, I found Nick and his friends asleep. I sat on the steps in the sun, thinking about everything I’d seen and how fond I’d become of all the kids on the trip. I wasn’t sure what they were getting out of this excursion, but it was a glorious afternoon.