Wine, at least in individual bottles, isn't forever. Stubs from the Vatican Museum will fade and fall away. Venetian glass may not go with your décor. Next year why not consider taking home something from your vacation that will last you forever. A new language, for example.

After eight years of trying to become fluent in Italian mostly on our own, Marian and I decided to put our money where our mouths were: She'd read about a language school in Taormina, on the eastern coast of Sicily, in Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel. It went by the name of Babilonia (as in Tower of Babel) Centro di Lingua and Cultura Italiana. We located it on the web--there seem to be hundreds of language schools in Italy, though only one in Sicily--and determined that they were teaching real Italian, not the Sicilian dialect. We're reasonably well traveled in Italy but have never been to Sicily. Marian, who's half Calabrese, has a blood fondness for Sicily since, like Calabria, it's been overrun by the same peoples throughout history, the Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Arabs, the French, etc. I like ancient ruins (the more I come to resemble one, the fonder I get of them).

Thus began a flurry of e-mails in Italian involving certain formalities that sound ridiculous in English--they often include the Italian equivalent of Estimable Gentlemen-- and before long we'd picked a time and a course length. We only had a week to spend at Babilonia because we wanted to do some touring in other parts of Sicily and to visit Marian's cousin in Rome. Babilonia was one of the few schools that would allow us to attend for only one week; we later realized the wisdom of a two-week minimum. We arrived in Taormina a few days early and cased the joint on Sunday. The school is located in a building whose narrowness made us wonder, Internet deception being what it is, what kind of establishment we'd stumbled upon. But at 9AM on Monday, when we walked inside, the place was really hopping.

After an initial welcome by the school's director, Alessandro Adorno, a long haired young guy I couldn't connect with the imagined stuffy gentleman addressing me as "Gentile Signor Libster" in e-mails, I caught fragments of conversation on the roof garden with its breathtaking view of Etna, the glass-calm Straits of Messina and cactus-strewn cliffs. There was a Sicilian-American architect from Florida retiring to Taormina in his mid-forties because he'd suffered terminal burnout. A Welsh officer in Her Majesty's Navy bound for nearby Catania because his American wife was being transferred to the U.S. naval base there. An Anglo-American couple who'd put all their possessions in storage and were roaming the world. A goofy English lawyer who works half the year in Milan but spoke little Italian. A very young woman from North Carolina who had no idea what she wanted to do with her life but had relatives living in Taormina and a weakness for pizza boys. And a host of people speaking German. The command of Italian varied from none whatsoever to pretty good--a long placement test would soon challenge my ideas of how good my own Italian was. Afterward, without being told where we'd ranked, we were led in a game of "20 Questions" in Italian by a lithe, deeply tanned young woman with incredibly white teeth. This took our entire first class. Tomorrow first thing we'd learn where we stood academically.

On Tuesday, Marian and I are placed in separate classes, she in intermediate, I in quote advanced unquote. This is partly because I read a lot in Italian while Marian prefers to play jazz piano. The lithe young woman with the white teeth is my instructor. My fellow classmates include an Austrian-born cancer researcher at an English university, the only person in the room about my age. There are also a blond young woman with the face of a Valley Girl who is actually also an Austrian medical student with longings to be a Sybil; a very soft spoken Swiss girl, the class's best student, with the singular name of Naausica; and a widely traveled Chinese-Filipino American woman, a writer, from San Francisco. The class is a combination of grammar and conversation; sometimes the conversation is interrupted so the teacher can correct us. After two hours another instructor comes in to conduct uncritiqued conversation. A stunning dark-haired young woman, as elegant as the first is athletic and wearing an engagement ring with perhaps a thousand small diamonds, she will eventually dress far more casually but today she looks like a member of Sicilian royalty.

The plan is to spend four hours each day with a couple of breaks. The ghastly irony is that the second day at the school is also September 11. Because of the time difference we learn nothing about the tragedy until later. The next day we arrive stunned, but thank heaven this isn't just a day of ordinary tourism. We have a job to do, a class to attend. We have to be real. Students and teachers alike are devastated. I'm on the verge of tears and can't concentrate. But thank goodness we stick to our guns, so to speak. Anita, the lithe teacher, has photocopied some pages from a Sicilian newspaper. We read aloud. We write little essays, fill in blanks. Then Grazia, the elegant signorina, enters, looking as deathly pale as a bronzed Sicilian can get. We try to discuss our feelings about the incident. The attempt to convey feelings too deep for words in a language none of us really commands frees our minds from some of the pain of the feelings themselves. It's hard to retain images of people jumping out of the fiery inferno while you're wrestling with the correct use of the congiuntivo. By the end of the class, we're almost steady. And we've bonded.

Thursday we're all more composed. We listen to tapes of rapid conversations about embarrassing social situations and learn idioms useful when buttonholed by unpleasant people. After class, Marian and I do our homework in the gorgeous botanical garden with turtle pond behind our hotel or on the veranda overlooking a languid sea. The school has several activities for the evenings planned. On the evening before the disaster, we all go out to dinner. Marian and I sit next to a merry group of young women from Germany and Holland who joke about men a lot. They speak fluent English and are incredibly droll. Very little Italian is exchanged, though plenty of personal data goes from hand to hand. The evening is rich in laughter though the wine is watered and the food not terribly good. Other evening activities will include a geology lecture about Etna complete with a video showing an eruption in the same blazing red as the WTC explosion, a walking tour of the town that includes a trip to the famous Greek amphitheatre, and a barbecue consisting only of local sausage, powerful jug wines and crusty bread the likes of which I'd broken a tooth upon at breakfast. (The local dentist, a congenial young woman with long braids, does a temporary repair and won't accept payment. We briefly discuss in Italian the horrors of the event just gone by. The pleasure of such conversations, even about horrible subjects, is every bit as satisfying as a glass of 1971 Amarone--okay, Amarone isn't Sicilian, but it's my favorite wine.

Marian and I are both enjoying the school experience far more than we ever dreamt we would. I adore my teachers. And the warm give and take under the most difficult of circumstances is extraordinary. The final day, we've both reached the point where we can see how helpful an additional week would have been. We can easily imagine returning here or somewhere else in Italy--probably the latter since Taormina is essentially a town of swimmers and we are mountain folk. Also, there's relatively little to do fuori stagione, outside the peak tourist season of July and August, beside eat, stroll the traffic-free mall and stop at the astonishing variety of gelatorie.

By Friday we have perhaps a toehold on fluency, but our visits to the interior of Sicily and later to Rome prove how far we are from real mastery. Still, we agree that the experience was worthwhile in every way. For one thing, rather than the traditional stuff of language classes such as "Scusi ma dov'e' la posta?" (Excuse me, where's the post office?), we've had memorable conversations about the gravest, silliest and raunchiest of matters with people whose warmth, sympathy and humor during a time of extraordinary pain give us faith in the world's ultimate survival. Following our last class, we exchange e-mail addresses with some, hugs and handshakes with everyone, and we envy them their "see you Monday" to the students who will stay on. We have bought nothing whatsoever in Taormina, not even the tee shirt of Bart Simpson writing on the blackboard in Italian, "beans are not a musical instrument." But we've seen lots of signs in store windows saying, in English, "To our American friends, we share your pain."

Just before we go I stop in the school office to bid farewell to Alessandro and promise to send him a copy of my only published children's book so he can read it to his small nephew. When we tell him how much we've enjoyed our stay he suggests altering our plans and staying a second week. It's tempting, but impossible. On the evaluation form we've been asked to complete, I give every category five stars. Then we head for Hertz to pick up our rental car and after a few near mishaps--it's been four years since I've driven a car with a manual transmission--we are on the autostrada bound for Piazza Armerina, site of the world famous bikini girl mosaics. We will visit several other famous ruins in Sicily and Rome, including Nero's Domus Aurea (gold house) before returning home to the brave new world it's become.

by Bernie Libster

b.libster@worldnet.att.net

Some random tips:

You can reach Babilonia at www.babilonia.it. Remember, you don't have to know any Italian to attend, and if you're really fluent you can lie a little on the placement exam for the sake of the experience.

The school will recommend hotels and make reservations. Our hotel, the Villa Schuler, is lovely, spacious, friendly and moderately priced. If you prefer, the Babilonia staff will reserve a room in a local home--a great chance to get extra practice in your Italian--at very low rates.

Babilonia offers classes for business travelers as well as for us voyagers. If you're in earnest, you can take full day classes with private conversation lessons in the PM. If you should write to Babilonia, I suggest dropping the Gentile Signore business and address it to Caro Alessandro (tell him we sent you).

There are numerous car rental companies in Taormina, but if you've never driven in Sicily, think twice.

Taormina is relatively near such cities as Siracusa (where Archimedes ran naked through the streets shouting "eureka" after discovering his famous principle), and Ragusa, noted for its old Arab-built quarter, Ragusa Ibla, so you can explore them on a weekend and return to class on Monday. Catania and Messina are closer but not well spoken of in the guide books, though all the Babilonia teachers live in Catania and anyplace that can produce such teachers can't be all bad.

Babilonia is a member of an organization called A.S.I.L.S., the Association of Language Schools of Italian as a Foreign Language. Members of this association are qualified to prepare students for entry into an Italian university, just in case you happen to have second-career ambitions. The teaching method is standardized among members and seemed appropriately rigorous to me. A.S.I.L.S. members can be found throughout Italy, including Rome, Bologna, Perugia and elsewhere.

As for the wines, those we had weren't memorable. But the circumstances under which we drank them were.

By the way, if Italian isn't your language of choice, there are classes in many other languages in many countries. Try going to www.google.com and searching on the language you prefer.