I was 19 when I moved to Rome in January 2020.
I was going to a school that has a campus in Rome, so studying abroad was almost too easy. It didn’t cost anything extra; there were about 200 of us basically living in freshman dorms again, and I could knock out my gen eds while traveling around Europe.
Freshman dorms again. But make it Rome.
Obviously, I had a very romantic idea of what the semester was going to be like. How can you not? I was supposed to be there for five months. I made it two. This was January, before everything hit the fan.
On maybe my second or third night, my friends and I went out in Trastevere to this disgusting bar that was notorious for American study-abroad students. Later, once COVID started, we used to joke that COVID didn’t start in China. It started in this bar.
Seriously. They had dildo attachments on the liquor bottles and would pour shots directly into people’s mouths without cleaning them. It was so nasty. It was also exactly what you’re looking for when you’re 19 and living in Rome.
One of the deals at this place was that if you flashed your boobs, you got free shots. So, of course, 19-year-old me did that.
As soon as I did, this guy from my program approached me. I’d seen him before in Chicago and knew his name, but that was about it. He was cute. Blond, blue eyes, maybe 5’10”. He was kind of giving future finance bro. Not exactly a frat guy, but in that general area.
He was charming and talkative, which is typically what I look for. We hit it off.
Next thing I know, he’s ordering tequila shots, and I’m back up on the bar doing body shots. We started making out, and eventually he was like, “Do you want to get out of here?”
Of course.
This was particularly convenient because we lived in the same building.
We got into a cab and immediately started making out again. Things escalated. Dick was out. I could tell the cab driver knew exactly what was going on.
And I was like, Great. Love this for me.
But it was fun. Kind of spontaneous and exhibitionistic. I remember thinking, Okay, maybe this is unlocking something for me.
Then, suddenly, the cab driver slams on the brakes.
My hand is literally on this guy’s dick, and we’re both jolted forward. We looked out the window. There had been a motorcycle accident right in front of us.
The motorcycle was tipped over, and I remember the guy being sort of underneath it. It definitely did not look good.
The cab driver got out to help, which was very nice of him. But I was also like: Okay. What are we supposed to do?
An ambulance was coming. I don’t speak Italian. Am I going to get out and stand there and add more chaos?
No. So we stayed in the cab. Meanwhile, homeboy is still in my hand, still rock hard. So we just kind of kept going.
I have a latex allergy, so I always carried my own latex-free condoms. I gave him one, and he was weirdly thrown off by this.
I was like, Okay, whatever. Just use it. Don’t be fucking weird about it.
There was a crowd of people maybe fifteen feet away dealing with this motorcycle accident, and I got on top of this guy and started riding him in the back of the cab.
I mean, what was I going to do? That guy’s unfortunate spill was a perfect distraction. As far as I could tell, no one was watching the gently rocking Fiat. We finished. Or rather, he finished.
Right on cue, the cab driver got back in and resumed driving us home, while my fellow student started fingering me in the back seat and was starting to get hard again.
We got back to the dorm and went up to my room. At some point I learned he’d gone to an all-boys school, which started to make certain things click into place.
Like: Oh. Okay. Maybe you just don’t really know what’s going on.
We ended up having sex again in the shower while my roommates were banging on the door trying to get back into our room. The sex itself wasn’t anything crazy impressive. He did eventually go down on me and make me come, which was good.
Then he left, my roommates came in, and naturally we did the debrief that girls do afterward. Whatever. Fun night in Rome. The next day, our school took a bunch of us to the Vatican. Of course he was there.
We were standing in St. Peter’s Square when I noticed him talking to one of my roommates across the way. I could tell from her face that something weird was happening. She was giving me these eyes like, What the hell?
So I walked over. He turned to me and said:
“Do you have chlamydia?”
Sorry, what?
“No.”
“Well, you were making me use special condoms.”
Again: What?
I explained that I have a latex allergy and also, ideally, did not want to get pregnant two days into living in a Catholic country at 19 years old. He got all flustered.
And I’m standing there thinking: This is so ironic. We are literally in the Vatican, you are asking me if I have chlamydia, and you clearly have some massive Catholic guilt complex about the fact that we had casual sex.
Also: Do you think special anti-chlamydia condoms are a thing?
I was like, Oh my God. You never had sex ed. This makes so much sense.
After that, he became this weird recurring character in my semester. My friends and I joked that he was a ghost haunting the narrative of my time in Italy.
I’d see him down the hall. I’d see him around campus. Once my friends and I went to Naples and Pompeii for the weekend and he literally came around a corner.
I was like, How the fuck did you end up here?
Then COVID happened.
Northern Italy started shutting down, then Florence, then other study-abroad programs. One night we all sat in a common room watching Trump announce travel restrictions on this huge projector. Our university basically told us: You have 72 hours to get on a plane. We don’t care where you go. You just have to leave.
So my five-month romantic semester in Rome lasted about two months. I did manage to have some other experiences with Italian guys before I left. That was better.
They didn’t haunt my life afterward. My guy somehow still wasn’t finished popping up now and again. Two years later, back in Chicago after peak COVID, I walked into one of my classes, and there he was. And because apparently the universe has a sense of humor, we ended up having to do a debate together. The topic? The ethics of Pornhub. Of fucking course. But honestly, the Vatican thing should have told me everything I needed to know.
This was a guy who had gone to an all-boys school, ended up at a Catholic university, and had apparently received so little sex education that when a woman handed him a latex-free condom, his first thought was not, Maybe she’s allergic to latex.
It was, This must be for chlamydia.
And he waited until we were standing in St. Peter’s Square to ask me about it. Like, directly outside the Vatican. I don’t think you could design a more perfect monument to Catholic sex education if you tried.
