Q&A Frank Nero

Interview with Frank Nero, FSU Florence program director

By Dani Brown

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.

Frank Nero, with FSU President John Thrasher and Florence Associate Director Lucia Cossari.

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.

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 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.

All photos courtesy of Frank Nero Frank Nero, at the Capitoline Museums in Rome, in front of the bust of his namesake, Emperor Nero.

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

the Florentine community but also have our courses count toward the liberal arts requirements and as many popular majors as we can. For the first time in Florence’s 52-year history, we’re launching some really exciting new classes: astronomy and environmental science courses taught by the director of one of Italy’s biggest space observatories; classes in Italian fashion and fashion marketing; a communication course taught by a reporter for the Rome bureau of The New York Times; an Italian food and wine culture class taught by a professional sommelier;a history of the Italian Mafia class; and a multi-disciplinary course called Vistas on Florence, which traces visual and literary traditions from the Middle Ages to the year our program was founded in 1966. We’ve also added mythology and Italian archaeology classes taught by Dr. Nancy de Grummond from the Department of Classics, who is one of the world’s foremost Etruscan scholars; we’ve added business classes, a psychology course, and many other diverse and eclectic classes.

What are you most excited about in your program?

I’m excited about two things, but one has to remain a secret for the time being. All I can say is this: Thanks to the hard work of Lucia, it has the potential to change the entire future of the Florence program in a tremendous way for all prospective students. Stay tuned. It’s going to be huge. The other thing I can talk about: This fall semester, FSU, in collaboration with Italian entities and SACI [Studio Arts College International, an American art school in Florence], will be opening its own museum in the town of Gaiole in Tuscany, outside of Florence. The museum will house antiquities found by FSU students and faculty at our archaeological dig at Cetamura del Chianti since the 1970s. These Etruscan, Roman, and medieval artifacts will permanently be on display. Florence program students enrolled in Dr. de Grummond’s ARH 3150 class will be largely responsible for setting up the museum. We’re going to have the grand opening probably the first week of December. The future possibilities for FSU students at the museum are endless.

At the Cathedral of Lucca, touching the Labyrinth of Daedalus, carved in the 12th century and symbolic of how faith can lead one out of the maze of sin.

What challenges have you encountered or foresee as the new director of the Florence program?

“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” I just want to make sure everyone—the students, staff, faculty, alumni—have the best experience possible. Like all families, there are difficulties, but they are always solved.

What changes have you already made and hope to make as the new director?

I myself haven’t made any changes. It truly is a collaborative effort between me, Lucia, and the rest of the staff, as well as International Programs’s expertise, support, and enthusiasm, as we try to expand our horizons both internally and externally out into the city. Some changes that I think we’ve effectively collaborated on are the quality and length of our program excursions, amazing group meals at vineyards and historical venues, activities within Florence, and new opportunities for students to volunteer; we want a proactive, interactive, and energetic program. This summer our students raised close to 4,000 euro in support of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Foundation of Italy and their campaign against bullying in Italian elementary schools. These are the kinds of changes that we can all be proud of as Seminoles.

Another change I personally am proud of is that our program soccer team used to be perennially in last place, but last spring we were able to coach our Noles up and we reached the semifinals of the International Schools Fiorenza Cup. If you’re a student and you have some soccer skills, both males and females, we need you to apply to the Florence Program so one day we can take home the cup and display some hardware in our study center.

Overall, the launch of our Fashion Merchandising and Communication major-track program is going to be great, and hopefully one day we can build a similar program with the Dedman School of Hospitality. I’m also very proud of the new relationship we have with my old department on campus, the Department of Art History, because now we collaborate every summer on bringing two doctoral students to Florence in order that they get some real experience teaching before the monuments. I’m happy that more graduate students on the home campus will get the same opportunities I had. Another cool thing is that we expand-

Frank Nero talks with students about Michelangelo’s architecture on the Capitoline Hill in Rome.

ed our student meal voucher plan to include close to 30 restaurants, pizzerias, panini places, etc. Many of the positive changes are due to the vision of Lucia, our associate director. Another proactive change is that we are beginning to reach out more to our Florence alumni. We want them to be aware of how great the program is doing, and we want them to know they will always have a home here. Former students are always coming back to Florence, and we are excited to get to know them.

What is your favorite part about living in Florence?

I should say the art, but come on, it’s the food. The only problem is I’m starting to get a pizza and pasta belly. I have to get back in the gym.

What do you like to do outside of work?

Listen to old school Bruce [Springsteen] and [Frank] Sinatra—or think up all of the Great American novels I’ll probably never write. I like to cook sometimes too, or wander around the same streets where Galileo, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Donatello, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Amerigo Vespucci, and Dante walked. Even after all these years, it still gives me the chills.

Could you please describe the Florence program in one sentence?

Our goal is to combat biases, combat misconceptions about difference, combat all the things that divide us, and to use the experience we’ve had in Florence (good and bad), the education we’ve received, the new people and new language and new cultures and new cuisine we have learned to appreciate, on our own and through our professors and Florentine friends, as something to bring back home to our country, our communities, our campus, our homes and families, to make our own society a better place—to use this moveable feast for good. For me, this is the most important aspect of getting an international education and being a Florida State Seminole. Student editor Dani Brown conducted this email interview.