Students' life abroad under scrutiny after Italy murder

PERUGIA, Italy — For many college students, a year abroad is an experience of a lifetime — an opportunity to learn a new language and travel and live in a new culture. But it's often just as much about partying in a place where alcohol and drugs are readily available.

Now, the murder of a 21-year-old Briton studying in this picturesque Italian city is throwing a light on the wild life of college kids abroad.

Meredith Kercher was sexually assaulted and stabbed to death Nov. 1 in the apartment she shared with her American roommate, University of Washington student Amanda Marie Knox, who is in custody along with two other people in connection with the death.

The gruesome tale of sex, drugs and murder has gripped Italy, and even the Vatican has weighed in on what it called the "dangers" of students living far from home and family.

Knox, 20, of Seattle, and her one-time boyfriend and Italian co-defendant, 23-year-old Raffaele Sollecito, are due in court Friday for a hearing on whether they should remain in jail while the probe continues.

A third suspect, Rudy Hermann Guede, a native of Ivory Coast, is in detention in Germany awaiting extradition to Italy. Another man, Diya "Patrick" Lumumba, a native of Congo who owned the Perugia bar where Knox worked and whom she accused of the murder, was recently released from jail for lack of evidence. All four deny wrongdoing.

The case, and particularly Knox's alleged role, has made headlines in Italy, Britain, the U.S. and beyond in part because of the light it has shone on the seemingly privileged world of students studying abroad.

In many European capitals, the close-knit world of foreign students is hard to miss.

Groups of rowdy, mostly English-speaking students are routinely seen staggering through central squares, like Rome's Campo dei Fiori, on any given Saturday night, frequenting bars that carry "Two-for-One" or "Lady's Night" signs that clearly target English-speakers out to get drunk.

But Perugia, population 150,000, seemed to provide a different experience for students.

With its steep medieval streets and heavy presence of European students attending its University for Foreigners, Perugia was off the beaten track for Americans, said Carol Clark, the American director of the Perugia Umbra Institute, which offers programs for U.S. students.

"Here, foreign students tend to live in apartments with international roommates, buy food, interact with locals," although the foreign community still has their own pubs and meeting points, she said.

The students who come to Perugia, she said, "want a place which is less Americanized," than the big cities that attract many U.S. college programs.

But alcohol and drugs are certainly available, said Esteban Garcia Pascual, an Argentine whose bar "La Tana dell'Orso" is a top destination for foreign students in Perugia.

"Perugia is more of a break to them than a commitment," he said. "For them, it is a new world. They come here, have fun and get trashed in the evening."

Not all students come to Perugia — or go on study abroad programs — just to have fun with other Americans, said Zachary Nowak, a 30-year-old New Yorker who fell in love with Perugia during a study abroad program and never left.

"They are really integrated," he said of the foreign students. "There's no Campo dei Fiori here, they have to make an effort. If they want to order a margarita in English in a bar, they'd go to Rome or Florence."