Perugia

Perugia is not a place that usually detains the world’s thoughts for long – an attractive hilltop town of about 150,000 people, capital of Umbria, centre of the Italian chocolate industry (or at least the part that isn’t owned by Nestlé, which also has a factory there) and home of the University for Foreigners (although there is another in Siena). But now the international press has focused on the bizarre murder of an English girl student, Meredith Kercher. As befits such a place the dramatis personae are an eclectic bunch: an American girl, an Italian man, a Congolese bar owner and a basketball player from the Ivory Coast.

It is not, to say the least, what one might expect of such a place. Perugia is provincial, not just in the sense of being a province but inward-looking, with a tradition of independence stretching back to its having been one of the twelve cities of Etruria and displaying a sometimes haughty disinterest to the Roman Empire. But the town has never seen anything like this. A friend who has been going there for 25 years says the place has changed almost overnight. People look at each other suspiciously; every hooded youth could be a drug dealer with a knife; or worse, a reporter.

The social fabric of Perugia, particularly in the evenings, is dominated by the Strangers’ University. This was set up by a local philanthropist in the early 1920s and soon appropriated by Mussolini as an international propaganda tool, for the dissemination of modern Italian culture world wide. Some people say that the problems started when, short of money, it found it could pay its way by attracting the children of the rich, many of them Arabs, now Russian. The deal seems to be something like a holiday gap year and the understretched students are easy fodder for the drug dealers.

The Universita’ per Stranieri is a good idea but it needs to change. It needs to become more of an academic institution, less of a summer camp. It needs to select its students academically rather than by wealth, but alas there is no tradition of this in Italy, where everyone can go to University and employers are prevented from discriminating between one university degree and another.

The Universita’ per Stranieri could be the goose that lays the golden eggs for Perugia or its millstone, a burden from which the town can never free itself, a druggy free-for-all that brings down the whole city. It must choose.