II.xii. The Faculty Club

"Report of fashions in proud Italy,
Whose manners still our tardy-apish nation
Limps after in base imitation."
- William Shakespeare

Well-preserved older women have been teaching me a lot of Art History lately. My professors, for example, are all roughly the same type of glamorous female academic that has no real equivalent in North America. They yet again serve to illustrate the idea of bella figura so prevalent here, a dignity and poise that has its roots in the Renaissance and Castiglione's Book of the Courtier. For these professors, lecturing is a stage show, even if the audience is loathe to demonstrate its appreciation
    Firstly, of course, there is professor Muzzarelli, with a university-wide reputation for being a snob, intellectual or otherwise. She presides over my class of medieval history, and teaches it in an abstract but not altogether disengaging way. Her outfits, however, blend her seriousness as a scholar with a panache and originality seldom seen among her kind. Just last week she arrived in class wearing the severest of black suits accompanied by garishly multicoloured socks. It was not something just anyone could get away with, but somehow she was able to pull it off.
    Secondly, there is Deanna Lenzi, the professor with whom I am least familiar, and perhaps also the least stunning of the trio of Bolognese women I take notes from. She is old, and has the faded but still domineering presence of a woman who had to teach through years of being among the few women in her department. Now things have changed, but she remains my sole prima fascia, or first rank, professor, though she is perhaps a little worse for the wear, in terms of memory and appearance. She teaches a small Modern Architecture course that focuses on Bolognese monuments. It fascinates me, and I am looking forward to the classes that are devoted to walking tours of various city districts. Her class is dominated by Americans who seem bewildered that Modern in the Italian dictum begins with Ghiberti and not Gaudi. I sit near the back of this surprisingly empty class, and Deanna and I have a good working relationship. As she is forgetful and has trouble identifying the odd slide, I help her out with my arcane but vast skill in identifying the interiors of old churches. This is a skill I learned by sifting through hundreds of old black and white photographs I once found at my Grandmother's house, taken by my Grandfather in the early nineteen fifties, before over-cleaning campaigns had bleached every great Cathedral from Palermo to Saint Petersburg a whiter shade of stone.
    But most glamorous of all is Lucia Corrain, though her stunning presence seems to be ignored by most students in her rather large Semiotics of Art class. She is, truly, a beautiful scholar, though not the first Bologna has known. A fourteenth century chronicler speaks of a certain Novella d'Andrea, a docent so beautiful she had to keep her face veiled so as to not distract her male students from the pursuit of knowledge alone. Lucia Corrain is perhaps not quite so distracting, but her fashion sense is by all measures second to none. Just the other day, for example, she arrived in class wearing a black jacket with oddly spaced white fur patches. It appeared as though she had been attacked by some large quadruped, or had some sort of run-in with bleach, were it not for her usual flawless poise and elegant gestures. An extra thirty years of age were all that prevented her from being on a runway in Milan, sporting Gianni Versace's latest creations. This is a sort of style I am totally unaccustomed too, even for female professors. In Toronto and most elsewhere, Medievalists and Art Historians form an odd bunch, slightly aloof and certainly at a considerable distance from the latest fashion trends. At the Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies, tethered thick-rimmed glasses take the place of Pashmina shawls. Among the Art Historians the situation is not much better, and even among male professors the turtle neck with blazer is most common. Here, three-piece suits are the norm, and there is never even the slightest confusion of ranks. I haven't noticed the famed pedestals of Italian professors in terms of attitudes or actions; I have only noticed them in terms of clothing.
    But Italian style, so stereotypical and so symbolic, is reserved for the older generations. How wrong I was about bringing my nicest clothes here. Every student in Italy wears jeans, most have sneakers, and a good part sport dreadlocks. There is an element of Bohemian chick, I suppose, but mostly it is just a glaringly obvious attempt to differentiate young from old.
    The generation gap manifests itself most clearly in terms of glamour. Older women here have a style and presence here that the younger half lack. It puzzles me more and more each day that in this land where painters so often depicted the most beautiful women imaginable the female youth of today seem so plain to me. All one has to do is walk into a church to see the most voluptuously beautiful Madonnas and saints peering back from candle-lit altars, but the pale, perfect faces of Raphael, Francia, and Fra Angelico certainly don't peer back from the hordes of ragazze that dress without much care, smoke cigarettes in the faculty courtyards, and tan to absurdity on the beaches of Rimini. It is a disappointment I suppose I will have to get over. In this country, I only will be paying attention to older women.