Housing

    Housing in Bologna is somewhat of a hit and miss affair.  If your program does not already provide housing for you, then you are going to have something of an adventure.  If you have to look for an apartment your best bet is to look at the numerous ads posted along Via Zamboni, or at the Bussola, the University's housing office. 

    I eventually found my apartment through Bussola.  While I only paid 230 euros a month in rent, relatively low by Bologna standards, I had to share my apartment with four other guys.  As the photos will attest our apartment was something of a hole. Fortunately towards the end of the year we hired a cleaning lady and things were much better. 

    Living in student apartment in Bologna is fraught with shall we say “new experiences.”  Our hot water heater was a gas fired wall unit that sat right above our stove in the kitchen.   Unfortunately if you left the window open the pilot light would go out.  In order to relight the heater we had to find something long enough to reach the pilot light.  As matches were often in short supply we took to soaking the end of a piece of spaghetti in olive oil, setting it aflame and sticking way back into the heater until the pilot light took off.  You can imagine the calamities that ensued with five guys standing around playing with flaming spaghetti.

    Window screens and ceiling fans were also somewhat of an anomaly, which tended to make the summer months unbearable. Air conditioning? Forget about it, it just doesn’t exist.  Towards June when the heat became particularly oppressive we were faced with dilemma of opening the windows to let in all the mosquitoes, or close the windows and roast to death.  My roommates unanimously decided for the former, which left me feeling like I was camping out in a malarial swamp.  I would wake up in the morning with so many welts I looked like the heroin addicts that passed out on our doorstep.    While I pressed continually for putting up screens my roommates my roommates decided against them since they weren’t “aesthetically pleasing”.  Apparently they didn’t match the encrusted cigarette butts on the floor.  After many a sleepless night, I finally sent for some mosquito netting from an army surplus store to put over my bed, and the problem was solved. 

            The summer months also made for interesting evenings in our apartment building.  As the windows were generally open, we would always hear the old guy that lived beneath us watching Fantozzi late into the night, or worse yet the incessant creaking of the bed on the floor above us.   

     Fortunately I had pretty good roommates to share my experiences with, except for the one who tried to kill me.   One roommate aptly nicknamed “Antoniotto”, or the anglicized version “Fat Tony” was an accordion virtuoso.  Nothing was quite so enjoyable as tarantella accompanied by live music.  

The other Antonio, who sometimes went by his rap name “Lil’ Toni,” was no slouch himself when it came to music.  The leader singer of a local punk rock band, he also enjoyed rap music, and would occupy the bathroom until he had completed an entire Eminem CD karaoke style.   

The good thing however about having a flat with having an apartment that was already pretty dirty, was that we could throw huge parties  and you really couldn’t tell the difference. 

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