UC High Cross Country Coach and Ceramics Teacher Gimi McCarthy has had his shares of adventures and good times. What many don’t know is that aside from being a coach, a teacher and once a collegiate athlete, McCarthy is also an architect who, at one point, lived in Italy and had the opportunity to experience Italian culture.
McCarthy spent a year in Italy when he was 22 years old. At the time he was in his fifth year of architecture school at Cal Poly and was part of the Cal State International program. He went to Florence with 24 of his fellow classmates to study at a Cal State school in Italy. During his stay he learned Italian, architecture, art history and pretty much everything in between.
McCarthy spent seven weeks in a classroom for around five hours a day learning Italian with his fellow classmates; it was part of the program to get the students to learn the language. During this time they stayed in hotels, but once the seven weeks were up, the students knew Italian and were thrown into apartments and simultaneously were immersed into the true Italian culture.
Two years later he got a rotary scholarship to go back and study at the University of Rome for another year. This time he was submersed in the culture even more than the first time around. By his second trip back, McCarthy knew fluent Italian and lived among locals and would go months without speaking English. While McCarthy lived in Rome, he became friends with a number of people who worked in an architect office and ended up returning to Italy to work there two years later for an additional year.
During McCarthy’s time in Italy, he did what you’d imagine a young architect student would do. He ate amazing food and visited various buildings. During this time, he discovered his favorite building, The Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore (Basilica of Saint Mary of the Flower), which is a beautiful Florence Cathedral with impressive architecture and topped with Brunelleschi Dome (a brick dome named after the architect who built it).
So were Italy’s famous pasta dishes some of his favorite foods? As far as food goes, it was hard for McCarthy to name a favorite, but after giving it some thought, he went on to explain, “I worked at a restaurant called Osteria San Niccolo. It was very Tuscan Florentine food, not what you would typically think Italian food to be like pasta and pizza. It was soups and stews. They made this dish called Spezzatino. It was chunks of beef like a stew with fresh porcini mushrooms and the sauce was unbelievable. So at the end of the night when we were closing if they had any Spezzatino left they would give it to me.”
McCarthy still keeps in touch with many friends from his time in Italy and passionately speaks of his experience he gained from his time abroad. According to McCarthy, “World culture, it’s just cool to be abroad and understand that there’s a lot more to this world than what we think is the great world around us.”
When asked what McCarthy missed most about America during his time abroad it didn’t take him more than a second to reply with a passionate, “Mexican food.” Instead of California’s great Mexican food he had to settle for European, French and Dutch food — what a shame. From living abroad McCarthy has become passionate about two things: World culture and Mexican food.
More importantly, McCarthy gained a love for another country and the culture. He learned many things about the world around him and architecture, and he made a lifetime of friends and memories.