Ah, yes. Ditto the above — welcome to The Rest Of The World. And Italy, IIRC, has by far the highest rate of immigration from subsaharan Africa in Europe. There were certainly hordes of people from those parts when I was walking around the Genovese ghettoes, so there’re surely a fair number around Milan, too, but I doubt they’ve dabbled in affirmative action over there, so their absence on campus is not particularly surprising (given that most of the immigration has been very recent, and from regions without any serious accessible education system).

But usually people are being polite by asking where I’m from. The more common question is: Chinese? Japanese?
I would be curious to meet a black person here to ask if he/she needs to clarify from which african country he/she originates. BTW, that’s another thing that makes me uncomfortable–very little ethnic diversity here. I have yet to see a black student at school. There are also no facilities to accomodate the physically impared.

you’ll also notice that europeans will be very confused if shown a US-style political world map where there’s one color per country but each US state gets its own color.

My mother, e.g., refers to jacks as “Swedish Jack” (to distinguish him from a HS friend of mine named Jack who, independently of having been born in CA gets “Chinese Jack”).

Think about it — it’s not as foreign to the average American’s perspective as you might think — after all, you’ll still consider a black person around here black even if his family’s been in the US since the 18th century. It’s just that Europeans have finer-grained distinctions of the same sort. And yes, the average European will (at least think that he can) distinguish ethnicities at that fine-grained level from just looking at the person.