Q&A
with
Frank Nero, Florence program director
What are your official titles with Florida State and the Florence International Program? How long have you been with the Florence Program? My official title is director of Florida State University International Programs, Italy. My affiliation with the Florence Program is a long one; basically, I’m a true testament of how the Florence program can change the direction of a student’s life. I was a history major at FSU from 1990-94, and as an undergrad I decided to do the Florence program my senior year at the insistence of one of my humanities teachers. So, I’m an FSU Florence alumnus from 1994. Then I came back as a graduate student in FSU’s Department of Art History in 2005 to teach the ARH 2000: Art, Architecture, and Artistic Vision class. Basically, after that I only left Florence for a short time and remained an adjunct faculty member since then. In spring 2016, our longterm former director retired, and I received a call from Tallahassee asking me if I’d be interested in the job. I’ll never forget it. I had taken a year off from teaching and was working as a kayak attendant in a national wildlife refuge on Sanibel Island; I received the call while I was in the middle of kayaking in the mangrove forests of Tarpon Bay. I almost fell out of the boat. How many students per year study with the Florence Program? I think that in the last calendar year or so, around 450 students will have studied at the program.
Where were you born? Do you have dual citizenship between the U.S. and Italy? I’m just a blue-collar guy from the suburbs of New Jersey. Yes, I have dual citizenship. I was able to get it through my great-grandparents on my father’s side, who both were born in southern Italy in a region called Molise. They emigrated to New Jersey via Ellis Island in 1912. It’s a funny story, really, about how I got my dual citizenship, which happened quite by accident. Back in 2001, a friend and I took a road trip to my great-grandparents’ hometown, a stereotypical small Italian hilltop town with only a few hundred people and rundown buildings scorched by the sun with stray dogs lying around everywhere. I wanted to see the place that my grandmother had always talked to me about as a kid. This town is called Lupara, which in Italian means a rifle for shooting wolves. When we got there, there was only one café in the whole village, and while my friend distracted the barista, I went in the phone booth and tore out the page in the phonebook that had all of the people with my same last name. And then basically we went door-to-door trying to find out if I had any relatives. After getting many strange looks and doors slammed in our faces, lo and behold, the whole town ended up being related to me in one way or another. They put us up for almost a week, and I think I gained 100 pounds from all of the food they cooked for us. Anyway, one of my cousins there worked in the city hall, and he made official copies of all of my great-grandparents’ documents so I could bring them back and show my dad and grandfather. Years later, those documents were why I was able to get my dual citizenship, and they are really the reason why I can work in Italy for the program today. Could you briefly describe your education background, listing degrees, institutions, and dates? Ph.D. candidate at FSU in the Department of Art History. One day I’ll finish the dissertation.
Frank Nero, with FSU President John Thrasher and Florence Associate Director Lucia Cossari.
36 Nomadic Noles // Summer 2018
What initially led you to pursue a degree in art history? What is one of your favorite pieces of art? It was the Florence program that led me to pursue a degree in art history. The Florence program and the museums, monuments, and medieval and Renaissance history of Florence opened up a new world for me, one that I didn’t even know existed. I proceeded to graduate college with a history degree, and then I taught high school in Coral Gables for three years, and then in 1998 I decided just to move back to Florence on my own to teach myself Italian and art history. For an entire year-anda-half, I just haunted the libraries and museums and parks and cafes of the city on my own
All photos courtesy of Frank Nero
Frank Nero, at the Capitoline Museums in Rome, in front of the bust of his namesake, Emperor Nero. just trying to teach myself all I could about the subject matter. When I got good enough, I started moonlighting as a local tour guide. What is one of your favorite works of art? That’s a hard question. In Florence it may just be a work called Giambologna’s Abduction of the Sabine Woman, just because it tries to encapsulate all the known theories and philosophies regarding the art of sculpture and it literally enshrines those theories in stone. Another one could very well be Donatello’s wooden Mary Magdalene, which one could read as being the epitome of spiritual beauty conveyed by physical ugliness; the purification of the soul through penance, pathos, and suffering, yet having the faith to see through the past into a glorious future. Could you describe your decision process of moving to Italy? I felt I owed it to my alma mater. Simple as that. I’d like students to experience Florence as I did in my college years. Like Hemingway said about Paris, “If one is lucky enough to have lived in (Florence) as a young man (or young woman), no matter where you go for the rest of your life you take it with you, for (Florence) is a moveable feast.” How do you set the curriculum so students get the most out of their experience? This is a hard question but is one of the aspects of the job that I find most exciting and rewarding—one that took about two years of consultation with Florence Associate Director Lucia Cossari, consultation with the program management team at International Programs, building and rebuilding relationships with different departments on the home campus, and trying to study and target what sort of courses would be attractive for both First Year Abroad students and upperclassmen. We would like students to have a unique learning experience that is integrated into
