Woolf had a point

A room of one's own and five hundred pounds a year were what Virginia Woolf said people need in order to write. I was pretty dismayed on getting to Bologna to discover that the free accomodation ("shared apartment") that comes with what they call a "fellowship" is a shared bedsit! The woman I'm supposed to share with seems very nice, but is even older than me and also doesn't want to share a bedroom and a single desk for six months. I can't believe the Institute of Advanced Studies really thought that would be OK. It's more common in Italy than in England for students to share a room, but even so, my student days are a long long time behind me. Anyway the amazing thing about not being a teenager any more is you don't have to put up with this sort of thing, so after a short stay in a hotel I have found myself a room in town to move into on Tuesday. It's a large nice room, in a flat shared with two other women, one of whom speaks English, but anyway it will be good for me to try to speak Italian as much as possible. And wonderfully, there is also a cat! The cat is a fluffy grey cat called Figaro, who likes to pounce on imaginary mice. I am very hopeful that this will all work out OK. It's simply not possible for me to sleep in the same room as a complete stranger for months on end; after about a week they would find me shrivelled up in my bed like a dried up monkey, aged by millennia through the constant company.

The problem is that now it is a case of a room of one's own versus the five hundred pounds a year, i.e. financial independence, because the rent will reduce my stipend to the level of a nice gesture. Still it's only for six months so hopefully I won't run up vast debts.

Bologna is otherwise very excellent. There are posters with little tear-off phone number slips on the lamp-posts advertising tuition in Latin and Greek. The department where I will be working is very friendly and surprisingly organised, and it's in a huge sixteenth-century palazzo. Next week I start an intensive "Italiano per stranieri" course. To enrol they made us all introduce ourselves in turn in Italian and when I said was studying palaeography they gave me respect: this has never happened before. So I think I will like it very much here once I've settled in to my new room and unpacked my things.

Obviously I was worried I would have withdrawal symptoms from British TV so I downloaded some 4OD stuff before I left. I have watched the first 3 episodes of Shameless now, and I think it's back to its best. "Well, form is temporary but class is permanent" as Frank Gallagher says. I also watched the first episode of City of Vice, which I quite liked, though there was something rather naive about it somehow. I have read A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo, which is very good, as is Can Any Mother Help Me? by Jenna Bailey, and I am partway through Julian Rathbone's The Mutiny, which is good but odd because I think of him as a very cheeky writer, and this isn't cheeky at all.