Americans Gone Wild in Italy—Again

Travel Blog • Joanna Kakissis • 03.27.08 | 10:43 AM ET

Didn’t we hear this story last year? Does it get juicier if the drunks involved are well-heeled American women spending their college study abroad programs “vomiting off the sides of the cobblestone streets,” as a city councilman in Florence told National Public Radio? About 80 percent of the 7,000 American study-abroad students are women, and hundreds of them are partying like they’re on a long, wild spring break.

Florentines—surprise, surprise—are not cool with this; at the very least, they resent cleaning the nightly detritus of puke, plastic cups and empty vodka bottles littering their fair city. Meanwhile, some Americans are cringing at the comeback of the out-of-control American party animal, one of the oldest and most corrosive travel stereotypes around. As one New York college student in Florence told NPR: “After one of the experiences of seeing this American girl just like basically strip on the bar…it made my friends and I feel really embarrassed to be here and be American and kind of want to hide that we were American.”

Over the years, I’ve seen many American friends go wild with the booze during trips to Greece. (Note to travelers: Ouzo is not meant to be guzzled.) None of them, thankfully, devolved into the hyper-inebriated, smash-em-up tourists who flash their privates to terrified grandmothers in Malia, Crete, every summer. The visiting drunksters bring in a lot of tourist money, but I suspect the locals in this once-beautiful, now pitiful village realize that they have paid the ultimate price: Their village belongs to the tourists, who have no respect for it, who don’t even see it.

It’s how Florentines feel and maybe a lot of other people in tourism-dependent areas. Malia has Minoan ruins, but the “drunkies,” as my Greek mother calls them in her inventive English, probably don’t care about that. They’re lost in the haze of their alcohol raves, and we all know they could have stayed home for that.