A MONTH OF ITALIAN IN FLORENCE When I told friends I was taking a month off work to study Italian in Florence, the reactions were mixed. Some thought it was a brave use of my limited annual leave; others struggled to hide the suspicion that I was simply running away from a difficult patch at the office. Perhaps both were right. What I knew for certain was that, after three years of evening classes in London, my Italian had reached a familiar wall: I could read a newspaper article fairly well, but in a real café I would freeze and the conversation would carry on without me. The school I had chosen sat in a quiet courtyard a short walk from the river. There were eight of us in my class, ranging in age from a Norwegian medical student to a retired American teacher whose pace, I quickly noticed, none of us could match. Our teacher, Lucia, made no allowances for shyness; on the first morning she announced cheerfully that English would not be spoken in her classroom, then waited, smiling, while we worked out how to introduce ourselves without it. The mornings were exhausting. By lunchtime I would walk to a tiny trattoria off the main square, order what I had just rehearsed in my head, and reward myself with a glass of wine if the waiter responded as though I had said something normal rather than something baffling. Afternoons were for homework in the gardens or for the long, aimless walks the city seems designed for. I had expected to be lonely; I was not. Living alone in a foreign language, I found, leaves a great deal of mental space. The real breakthrough was not a moment but a habit. Around the third week, I noticed that I had stopped translating in my head before I spoke. A market trader joked with me about a tomato, and I laughed in time, without first checking what I had laughed at. Lucia, who had clearly seen this transformation many times before, pretended not to notice. I think she did not want to scare it away. Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether the month was really about Italian at all. The language certainly improved more in those four weeks than in the previous three years combined, and I am still proud of the conversations I now manage in shops at home. But what I really brought back was the unfamiliar pleasure of being a beginner — of having to ask, to fail, to ask again — at an age when most of my life had been carefully arranged to avoid exactly that.