Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

Siena couldn’t come soon enough. There I was, barricaded in a train compartment with a few dozen enraged Italian soccer fans trying to break down the door. Suddenly all the warnings I had received about being an American abroad began to make sense.

Immediately after landing in Rome, my traveling companion and I had boarded an overcrowded train to Siena and suddenly found ourselves surrounded by a herd of over-zealous soccer fans. Having just left a game that still had them quite enthused, they all carried little cartons of wine and sang to each other in slurred Italian, pausing only for swigs of their alcoholic grape juice or puffs on their ever-lit cigarettes. At first, I was quite amused by such a mixture of Italian virility (there was enough chest hair and gold chains to fill every cliché ever concocted about this nation’s men folk) and sexual ambiguity (homoeroticism and tight jeans abounded).

Very soon, however, my amusement turned sour. We were pulled into one of the cramped compartments by four other American travelers, who had just reclaimed their seats after asking the conductor to kick a group of the soccer fans out. Before I knew it, I was pressing the compartment’s door shut against the whole group of soccer fans, more for the sake of sparing my own life than out of spite against their contrary efforts. Ignoring the fact that we had paid for our tickets and they had not, we were six foreigners taking precedence over them in their own country, probably interrupting a weekly tradition that they had been carrying on for who knows how many years. And this, coupled with the powerful fuel they were gulping out of the cartons, had the soccer fans in quite a frenzy.

We endured the dialectic swears and thundering kicks against the glass of the compartment for about three hours while the train bucked its way through central Italy. I couldn’t help but smile. The warnings about anti-American sentiment that I had received back in the United States were beginning to make more sense.

When the train finally halted and the conductor came on the overhead speaker to announce “Siena,” we knew it was time to face our demise. We had to make the unpleasant choice between staying locked in our compartment until the fans made their way off the train (which could have been a few days, since the train was headed for the southernmost tip of Italy), or to brave our way past them as we made our way to the exit.

We opened the door to find a surprisingly pleasant sight—about 10 of the men were sprawled, comatose, in a bed of spilled wine, cigarette butts, and empty cartons, stretching the length of the entire car’s hallway. But now we were faced with a different problem: We all had luggage enough to last us three months, luggage that was not so easily carried over our heads or maneuvered around burly Italian bodies.

Biting my upturned lip, I resigned myself to fate and started tiptoeing down the hall toward the exit that marked our safety. No more than three steps in, however, my foot slipped on a puddle (hair grease or wine, I do not know which) and sent me sprawling over two of the sleeping gentlemen on the floor. Immediately we were surrounded, only a few feet from our escape, and smothered once again in Italian profanity and the sweat and stink of men who had spent the night on the floor of a public train.

One of the men singled me out, and rough as my Italian was, I knew he was asking if I had anything to say. I racked my brain for the right words.

“I’m sorry, friend," I said in halting Italian. "I only want to leave. My seat is now yours.” I grudgingly prepared myself for a taste of their wine—not from their cartons but from the knuckle that was about to break through my teeth.

To my surprise, there was a pause. The fan stared at me in disbelief, then looked around amusedly at the rest of his compatriots. He rambled off a few phrases that I could not understand, and then he turned and faced me again.

Addressing me once more, he smiled and raised his hand to my face. But instead of the punch I was expecting, he slapped me playfully on the cheek. “Arrivederci, bello,” he said, and stepped aside, indicating with an open arm that I was free to go.

Goodbye, beautiful? Was that really the only thing he had to say to me?

Well, I wasn’t about to question him at that point. So I lowered my head, muttered a goodbye under my breath, and rushed out the door.