ABOVE: Friends and classmates serenade a graduate near the headquarters of Ca' Foscari University in Venice.

In Venice, as elsewhere in Italy, university diplomas are awarded throughout the year. The graduates are honored with informal parties where they wear silly outfits (often with wreaths on their heads or around their necks) and are serenaded with the words:

Dottore, dottore
Dottore del buco del cul
Vaffancul! Vaffancul!

A word-by-word translation into English is slightly more elegant than the colloquial meaning, so we'll give you the former, with hyphens to prevent swooning by our more sensitive readers:

Doctor, doctor
Doctor of the mouth of the ass
F--- you! F--- you! 

Another element in the festivities is the graduation poster, which the laureate's friends post on walls for the entertainment of passers-by. 

The typical poster has a caricature of the graduating student and a long satirical poem. Some caricatures are pornographic, while others are relatively tame, like the one on this poster for a young woman named Valentina Pressanto who recently earned a diploma in restoration from the Fine Arts Academy of Verona:

If you'd like to be honored with a few stanzas of "Dottore, dottore..." and a graduation poster of your own, we suggest attending an institution of higher learning in Venice, the largest of which is Ca' Foscari University. (But you'll need to be patient and earn a degree--a mere semester of study abroad won't earn you a diploma, a wreath, and the good-natured ridicule of your Italian friends.)