By Alina Polonksa, Gazzetta di Mantova
Could you please tell me your name?
My name is Lorenzo Lucchini, I'm 27 years old and I'm from Mantova (although some people have told me I'm too friendly to be from Mantova).
What is Mantova Student Network?
MSN is the reference community that welcomes all university students, both international and local, who live, study or have studied in Mantova.
When was it founded and why?
The idea of MSN crystallized in my mind in 2020, during the pandemic, but it only started taking shape the following year.
The core objective was to create a safe, dynamic and transcultural space that would allow university students from all faculties to connect and experience Mantova in the best possible way (an opportunity that I didn't have when I decided to attend university here in the city).
Who makes up your community?
MSN is a network composed of an enormous variety of elements, both in terms of age and nationality. In our WhatsApp community alone, we count about 700 members, including around thirty collaborators.
I'm particularly interested in the Aperination initiative. When was it born? Who are its creators and what were its objectives?
Aperination was the first event that I conceived and managed to implement thanks to the help of another girl, Iulia.
The purpose of the event was to facilitate meetings between Italian and international students, and it consists of various language tables, where everyone sits according to the language they choose to use. There are no levels: the important thing is to meet and interact with people.
Two years ago, we expected that, in addition to international students, it would mainly be language students who would participate. Only later we realize that we had instead attracted a different audience, made up of students from other faculties, young professionals, and a few international students. Once it even happened that only Italians from 17 different regions and all faculties, except linguistics, participated in Aperination.
Over time, we eventually also welcomed those who we had identified as our initial target audience, and today, the variety of personalities attending Aperination is increasingly astonishing, even for us organizers.
How many meetings have you organized? Could you explain better how you organize them, what kind of meetings they are, how they are structured, and what nationalities and age groups are generally the participants?
Rather than meetings, we talk about events, or at most activities.
Since the first Aperination, dated May 3rd, 2022, we have organized more than 100 events, including movie nights and board games, bike rides, international aperitifs and dinners, but also activities involving other local organizations in Mantova, such as Acroyoga classes, historical/pirate explorations with Captain Crusco, Calisthenics courses with Arti, Escape Room nights, and much more.
The common thread of all activities is one: experiencing otherness. Meeting others is what helps individuals grow the most; the more the other represents an apparently more striking diversity, the more we learn to overcome distrust of the unknown and enrich ourselves more and more.
Those who come to our events are aware that they will have to overcome a small moment of initial discomfort, due to meeting and interacting with new people. However, this element of discomfort is absolutely necessary and is not at all comparable to the enormous value that one takes home.
Participants are typically between 20 and 30 years old, while the nationalities, represented by at least one member, are many: about forty ⬇️
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