There is a great deal of rhetoric surrounding the notion of a standard type of nurse. With claims of the globalisation of the nursing profession along with many other professions in the late twentieth century we risk oversimplifying the possibility of an actualisation of the "standard nurse". The following article looks briefly at the conditions and issues that confront a group of nurses working in a Rome intensive care unit. It argues that many of the difficulties they face as nurses arise from the incompatibility of the notion of a standard type of global nurse with their workplace conditions, professional support mechanism and various cultural and management based notions chich strongly influence their held identity.