The Way I See It: On Visiting Bologna By Dale Keiger I don't often envy people who are in their 20s. After all, I've got a job in my chosen field, something many of them can't find. I don't have to worry about a blind date showing up with pierced body parts. I feel no fashion pressure to wear a ballcap backwards, or shorts in February. But last month, after hanging out for a week at the Hopkins Bologna Center, which is about to celebrate its 40th anniversary, I found myself looking at the students there and thinking, You guys are lucky. The Bologna Center and I are about the same age. My knees and back hurt; the center seems to be holding up just fine. It resides in a four-story building on Via Belmeloro in the picturesque old part of the city. It's close enough to the University of Bologna for Italian students to wander down and grab a sandwich at its first-floor coffee bar. The center lets them do so, and also lets them use the library. It wants to be part of the community, not an American enclave. It wants to encourage cross-cultural mingling. Italians are great minglers, and the Americans I observed seemed to have picked up the skill, mingling in the lobby, the coffee bar and the little lounge at one of the stair landings. This would, I think, please the late C. Grove Haines, founder of the Bologna Center. A professor at the Nitze School for Advanced International Studies, Haines founded the center in 1954 on the sensible premise that anyone studying international relations would profit from conducting some of that study abroad. Not because the classes or teachers would be inherently better. The point was to take students, especially Americans, and put them in the midst of another culture, face-to-face with other smart people who grew up with a different set of social, political and cultural bearings. The center is big enough for diversity but small enough to imbue its 150 or so students with a sense of camaraderie. Almost all of them will be in Bologna for only a single academic year. It's a little like camp, but with a lot of homework and better food. I imagine many special friendships develop among the students, relationships made poignant by the knowledge that after nine months the Bologna experience ends. The class will reconvene the next year at SAIS in Washington, but for the Americans, at least, the bond that comes from being expatriates together surely must be missing. Like almost every part of Hopkins, the center could use more money. Its director, Robert Evans, explained to me that there is little tradition in Europe of giving to educational institutions; Europeans are used to state-supported education, not to writing checks for the alma mater's boosters club. The center is just now beginning to benefit from the generosity of alumni who have reached retirement--remember, the first class matriculated in '54, and those early classes were small. The center badly needs to take in tuition dollars, but to attract top students from outside the United States, it must offer fellowships; if a European student can find a loan, says Evans, chances are the interest rate would make it cheaper to simply charge the whole thing on a VISA card, were that possible. The computers in the center's library are functional, but Jurassic compared to the Powerbooks and ThinkPads some of the more fortunate students possess. Evans would like more space, but real estate in Bologna is expensive. The director is an optimist, though. The center keeps finding ways to raise its profile. While I was there, it hosted the 13th Bologna-Claremont Monetary Conference, signing up four Nobel laureates as panelists. The international pharmaceutical concern CIBA-Geigy has just provided $400,000 to promote international journalism. Bologna Center alumni make up a third of the International Court of Justice. Other alums are ambassadors, prominent foreign correspondents, international business executives and members of major international agencies. One, Charles Anson ('66), is press secretary to the queen of England. It's hard to imagine a school so full of energy and potent intellects not finding the means to prosper. Sitting in on classes, sipping aqua minerale in the coffee bar, wandering through the porticoed streets of Bologna, I envied anyone who had the opportunity to spend a year there. Not that there aren't hardships. The first-run movies in the theaters are all dubbed, and you just know the diner scenes in Pulp Fiction lose something in translation. Students crossing the streets run the constant risk of being flattened by Italian mopeds. Finding the right cheese for tacos can be a problem (Gorgonzola? please). Still, the American students I met seemed to be holding up well under the strain. But then, they are young. **Dale Keiger is senior writer for the Johns Hopkins Magazine.**