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Eleven replies in two days
Francesca is not exaggerating, and the reason is structural. Italy sends a very large share of its students away from home to study — Bologna, Padua, Pavia and Siena are university towns in a sense English speakers have to adjust to, where the student population is a visible fraction of the whole city — and almost none of them live in halls. Public student housing covers a small minority of those entitled to it, so the private market absorbs the rest, and every September the same squeeze happens in the same twenty streets. What follows from that is a set of habits worth knowing before you meet them. Rooms are advertised and taken within days, often without a written contract, and a posto letto — a bed in a shared room — is a normal listing rather than an insult. The landlord may ask a foreigner for a garante, an Italian guarantor, or for several months up front instead. Spese escluse in an ad is doing real work: the condominio charges from Lesson 53 land on top of the rent and can add a hundred euros a month. And the interview goes both ways — the current tenants choose, not the owner, which is why Francesca is reading punctuation for clues to who washes up.