Author: Gayane Simonyan
Living two months in Florence,my dream city, increased my love towards Italy even more. However, the last days in Florence were both the saddest and the happiest ones.
The hardest part for me now is to say goodbye to Florence where I have hundreds of thousands of memories with hundreds of thousands of lovely people who are part of those memories, the greatest adventures I’ve had with.
These two months in Florence gave me a lot. I’ve got life experience in a different atmosphere surrounded with people from any corner of the world. Everyone comes to get familiar with Italian architecture, art, music and of course Italian food. The communication language is Italian language and gestures that differ a lot from the ones I was familiar with. These are so unique- just typical to Italy as a second national language of communication.
Now a few words about my school, Istituto Europeo.
Starting from the coordinator Fabrizio Ulivieri who then turned out to be a writer- a talented writer- with so many ideas and interesting stories that you could talk to him for hours. Coordinating all the projects, caring for all the students, he would always be there for you when you need any help.
Then Ilaria, the secretary, who was the one to patiently answer to all of my questions which were, believe me, a lot. Ilaria seemed to know everything: she has an answer to any question you ask.
Rinaldo, the director who was always busy with making contracts, agreements, having business meetings, important guests. In other words he was always in rush- too busy but also too quick: he seemed to manage everything in a very short period of time. The most surprising thing for me was that, his mind being so busy, he could remember the names of all the students of our University and greet them by calling their names.
Then Rie and Motoko who helped me a lot because coming from a non EU country, you need a couple documents to be able to legally live in Italy.
Being a respected and hopefully loved member of the professional, international staff of Istituto Europeo for 2 months already, these people became sort of my second family with whom I was spending 5 hours a day sharing various ideas, stories, discussions over different topic and of course over the articles I was writing for the website.
So, leaving my heart to all my second-family members, saying goodbye to them, I’m going back to my country- Armenia.
