Powerless in Italy

Sunday, Sept. 28, 2003 was an important night in Rome. Italians prepared to celebrate La Notte Bianca, or the White Night. This is the first annual celebration where all the museums and metro trains stay open all night and everyone goes into town to party. As soon as everyone (Corey Montgomery, Lucas Bufano, Victor De La Rosa, Adrian Torres, Arturo Gomez and myself) got ready, we took the direct train to Rome. We arrived just before midnight, just in time to start celebrating Corey’s twenty-seventh birthday.

The night was going smooth and we were all having a good time experiencing the Roman nightlife. Around three-thirty in the morning while we were still at the club, all the lights went out. At first, we weren’t sure if this was just part of the show or if it was time to go home. Around the same time rain began to fall. As we started walking down the street, getting soaked along the way, we noticed all the lights were out and everyone was out roaming the streets.

Several miles down the road we realized the severity of the situation since all of Rome was powerless. We gathered with many others in various train stations trying to keep dry, and spent the majority of the night there. As our sleepless night came to a halt and the following day began, we found ourselves huddled in the corner of Termini, one of the main train stations in Rome. Sprawled out across the cold, wet tiles some of us managed to get a few hours of sleep.

The power was still down and we began to get worried. There was nothing we could do but wait. We were cold, hungry, tired and ready to go home. Being strangers in a foreign land, surrounded by foreign people, our native tongue isolated us from communication and comfort.

Words cannot describe the extent of our joy and relief when a voice announced the power was back. We all knew it was only a matter of time before we would be back in our safe beds at Hotel Gatti. Viterbo is a couple of hours outside of Rome, so it was not until nine o’clock at night that we got back (approximately the same time we left the night before, 24 hours later). We are all safe and sound now, excluding a cold or two, and have a unique experience to tell everybody.

One of the first things Marsha Anderson, our director of the Rome Studies Program, told us was to have pazienza, or patience. We all feel we learned the true meaning of those words after experiencing a night in the black out.