Some students, like the opera singer from Kansas and the Italian-Australian woman seeking her roots, had set ambitious goals of future fluency. My own aspirations were less lofty–I just wanted to acquire enough tourist Italian to be able to make my way around Tuscany on my own. Though I had missed the placement exam, my beginner status was never in doubt. My classmates, on the other hand, impressed me by flipping to the right page in their workbooks whenever Christina, the instructor, rattled off a number.

My glaring lack of Italian bothered Luisa, my "Italian Mamma," not at all. A slight woman trailing smoke from an ever-present cigarette, she showed me to a room overlooking her vegetable garden. It contained a dresser, a table, and a bed that sloped noticeably toward the center. "Ti piace?" she asked. Guessing that she was asking whether I liked it, I nodded and smiled. I nodded and smiled a lot those first few days.

But between Luisa’s homey chatter and Christina’s prodding, progress in Italiano was virtually guaranteed. Christina peppered us with questions about our lives outside the classroom, then stretched our meager vocabularies and imposed proper verb endings on our fledgling sentences. Sometimes she grouped us to create dialogs for improbable scenarios. Finally, no doubt with a sigh of relief, she turned us over to her colleague Pierluigi. Emphasizing rising and descending tones with his hands, the bearded Pierluigi drilled us on the finer points of pronunciation, like distinguishing casa (house) from cassa (cash) or pala (shovel) from palla (ball).

The overriding advantage of the Dante Alighiere School is its location in the medieval city of Siena. May Dante forgive me, what I remember best about Siena is neither grammatica nor ortografica, but treats like the traditional Siennese specialty Panforte, and Luisa’s Ribollita, thick with beans and bread and olive oil.

My classmates had already discovered the three-table trattoria with the unlikely name "Grattacielo" (Skyscraper), where the Mamma-and-Papa owners patiently weighed out individual portions of funghi, prosciutto, or Italian parsley with anchovies while a line formed behind us.

During our lunch break we sometimes descended the maze-like streets to Piazza Il Campo, where day-trippers from Florence trained their cameras on the Palazzo Pubblico and its Torre del Mangia. One day our fellow student Arturo led Mary and me to a pizzeria where, the previous evening, he had enjoyed his choice of pizzas for 7,000 lira. We were dismayed to learn that during the afternoon, when tourists filled the plaza, the price rose to almost twice the evening tariff.

By now, when Luisa asked "Ti piace?’ I answered "Si," or "buono… delizioso." Though Luisa’s meals were abundantly satisfying, occasionally I joined classmates for dinner in town, basking in the medieval ambience of a ristorante lodged in a centuries-old building, or sampling the exquisite creations of chef Paulo Senne in his tiny eatery Cane & Gatto (dogs and cats).

On school-sponsored walks through Siena, we listened to commentary in Italian as we examined interiors and exteriors of major landmarks–the magnificent Duomo, begun in 1220 and now a rival of the better-known cathedral in Florence; the Palazzo Pubblico and its exclamation mark of a tower; and Basilica San Domenico, where some of the language classes were held. On the way home, Mary and I sauntered through town, reconnoitering as-yet-undiscovered trattorias.

On weekends school personnel organized bus trips to attractions in the vicinity of Siena: Montepulciano, where we sipped the town’s celebrated Vino Nobile, and flower-filled Pienza, the town created for Pope Pius II. It was here, at Ristorante Dal Falco, that the motherly proprietress educated me. "One does not," she admonished good-naturedly, "eat bread with pasta!"

The best excursions were the ones we arranged on our own, courtesy of three Swiss students who had driven their own cars to Siena. We made the rounds of Tuscan hill towns with musical names–Castellina in Chianti, Radda in Chianti, Gaiole in Chianti–stopping for a cappuccino in one, an al fresco lunch in another. Later we watched the sun set as we dunked biscotti into our sweet vinsanto, high on a hillside covered with wildflowers. During these social outings, speakers of Swiss-Deutsch, French, English, Japanese and Swedish relied on Italian as the lingua franca.

Toward the end of the session, Mary and I invited Luisa to dinner and asked her to choose the restaurant. "What about Candido?" she asked, referring to the youth she had adopted. "Of course," we hastened to add, "Candido is invited." "It will be more fun if we ask the other ragazzi, don’t you think?" she continued, naming each of the other students currently in residence. "Oh, and my friend Patricio is coming to see me…" We made reservations for seventeen.

Patricio took us to the tiny Etruscan town of Murlo, south of Siena. We ate Etruscan-style dishes (without New-World tomatoes) in the pizzeria. Then we posed for snapshots, and toasted everyone in sight, plus a few others who didn’t make it. It was a great party.