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unabridged dictionary fell, onlookers screamed and reached across the barrier. I was shorter than most of the people around me, but I jumped up and down, yelling, “ Mi, mi, mi! ”
    I was amazed when a worker plopped the chocolate in my arms. People reached at it, picking little pieces off as I disentangled myself from the crowd. I rushed home, trying to get there before the block melted on my shirt. I unloaded it on the table and said, “ Voilà! ” Later, Meredith and I made chocolate chip cookies out of part of my winnings, trying to recreate the Toll House recipe from guesswork and memory.
    Another afternoon, I returned to the festival with Meredith. I flipped the video switch on my camera and acted like a TV journalist. “Tell me, Meredith, what do you think about being here at the Eurochocolate festival?”
    Meredith laughed and said, “No, no, don’t film me.” She pushed the camera away. She didn’t like being the center of attention.
    Neither of us felt we had to go far to be entertained. More days than not, three of the four guys who lived downstairs—Giacomo, Stefano, Marco M.—and another friend, Giorgio, dropped in during lunch and again after dinner for a stovetop espresso and, almost always, a joint. A few years older than Meredith and me, they were each equal parts big brother and shameless flirt. Students at the University of Perugia from Marche, the countryside east of Perugia, they’d sit around, get high, and gab about soap operas and game shows, movies, music—nothing in particular. Of the four, Giacomo, tall and sturdy like an American football player, with pierced ears, buzzed hair, and doe eyes, was the quietest and shiest. He played the bass, studied Spanish, and spoke English better than his roommates. When the guys weren’t at home, upstairs at our apartment, or at school, they were often playing basketball on the court in Piazza Grimana. One day, hoping to replicate the football games I loved to play with my guy friends at UW, I asked if I could come shoot hoops with them. “Sure,” they said. But when I got there I realized they thought I meant only to watch them play. It was another way in which my Seattle upbringing had left me unprepared for the cultural strictures of my new environment.
    Around our house, marijuana was as common as pasta. I never purchased it myself, but we all chipped in. For me, it was purely social, not something I’d ever do alone. I didn’t even know how to roll a joint and once spent an entire evening trying. I’d seen it done plenty of times in both Seattle and Perugia, but it was trickier than I thought it would be. Laura babysat my efforts, giving me pointers as I measured out the tobacco and pot and tried rolling the mixture into a smokable package. I never got it right that night, but I won a round of applause for trying. Either Filomena or Laura took a picture of me posing with it between my index and middle finger, as if it were a cigarette, and I a pouty 1950s pinup.
    I was being goofy, but this caricature of me as a sexpot would soon take hold around the world.

 
    Chapter 4
    October 2007
    M y big lesson on the first day of school at the University for Foreigners had nothing to do with academics. I’d shown up early for my 9 A.M. grammar class and then waited, alone, checking and rechecking my schedule, wondering if somehow I’d come to the wrong place. Finally, just when I was about to give up, everyone arrived, en masse, at 9:15. That’s when I learned that Italian time means T plus fifteen minutes, a tidbit I thought would probably be more useful to me than any verb I might learn to conjugate. I was even more charmed and appreciative the morning my pronunciation teacher announced that she needed a cigarette and suspended class while all fifteen of us walked outside for a quick shot of espresso or a smoke. Italians, I was coming to see, embrace any chance to have a good time. It was something I wasn’t used to.
    I went to school for two