Loitering Explained

A few nights ago, some friends and I had been walking back from a bar when we bumped into the two Italian lads we had met on our first night out. Once the initial excitement and surprise had passed, they invited us to join them, which we were more than happy to do. We walked a couple of blocks until reaching a kind of hole-in-the-wall type bar that we had failed to notice until now, and it was packed with people... well, outside anyway. When the time came for the bar to close, I assumed we'd all be going our separate ways but, instead, we just continued to stand outside, chatting. At this point, a few others had joined our our merry band - all locals - and the amount of noise we were making subsequently increased. It wasn't, necessarily, that we were being unreasonably loud, only that we were being too loud for the people sleeping in the apartments above - who, in hindsight, really shouldn't be living right above a bar anyway, and who, I can only assume, were the ones who called the police. We didn't get in trouble or anything, they simply asked us to go elsewhere. And elsewhere we went, gathering more and more people as we made our way. 

It was very strange, and was something I had been thinking about for a while: why did there always seem to be an endless number of youths at night, standing on street corners, seemingly doing nothing at all? Were they all just bored? Did they hate being home? The answer was given to me by the ring leader of yet another group we had joined. It was her birthday, so her group of loiterers was particularly large. She explained to me that it was probably because of the fraternities and sororities. Apparently, the system for these groups is a little different in Italy than it is for us in the United States. Here, there is only one fraternity and one sorority for each city, though there are some cities - like Florence - that only have one big co-ed group. These groups have social events at east once a week, and since their numbers are far too large to fit in any one building, at least here in Prato, they prefer to mingle in the streets. She went on to explain that, maybe for younger people and those not in a fraternity/sorority, hanging outside is also just a convenient way to meet new people and socialize, but, for the most part, many of the people we see are probably in one of these groups. At one point she had mentioned that Prato never used to have any bars until recently, only... pubs. You know, those places where old people exchange war stories and drown their sorrows. This, to me, seems like a likely cause for the mass loitering culture for young people here in the old city of Prato - since, what else would they do with their time?  

I was, admittedly, a little envious of this. Where I come from people tend to be a lot more distrusting of others, and standing on street corners all night in large groups means you're probably up to no good. The social environment here definitely seems very healthy, which, I assume, only serves to better the community as a whole.