VI.viii. A Villa in the Hills

"Universities are one of Italy's three biggest cancers; bureaucracy is another. The third I won't mention in order not to offend religious people."
- Federico Zeri

"Catechism, do the foreign students know what the Catechism is?" Anna Ottani Cavina asked, as though the world beyond the Alps hadn't been evangelized. Perhaps she intended to impress upon the Italian students that there were other people in the class, people with different sets of knowledge. I certainly found it odd that she, one of the more cosmopolitan members of her department, would ask something so ridiculous, but she had taught legions of American students, both in Bologna and overseas, and so I supposed she was speaking from experience. A scholar of strong but well thought-out opinions, she showed a self-awareness that was lacking in most faculty here. In her introductory class, she singled out the small number of foreign students, including me, and gave us a somewhat undeserving share of her intention. Her class, on the history of art from the High Renaissance to the early nineteenth century, was in fact to be greatly watered down for foreign students, with our requirement being shrunk to about a third of the normal workload. While it would be completely out of the question in North America, this is common practice in Italy, probably based on the assumption that living in Italy for a year is already enough of a challenge for foreigners. The latest female professor of mine certainly seemed to think so, and dwelled for some time on that subject and others, more or less pertinent to the class. Nevertheless, I enjoyed her cosmopolitan, tangential discussions that ranged from the Five and Dime Store empire of Samuel Kress to the birthplace of Frederick Chopin in Poland.
    Professor Ottani Cavina spent a good part of the next class discussing the various villas that eminent art historians had owned, placing special emphasis on that of Federico Zeri, who, along with Roberto Longhi, was one of the greatest Italian art historians of the twentieth century. Professor Ottani Cavina showed us slides of the elderly Zeri sitting in his beloved garden in Mentana, receiving an honourary doctorate from Bologna, and traveling to distant archaeological sites in Egypt and Syria. Intriguingly, close inspection of the photographs revealed that she was often accompanying him; a simple student-mentor type relationship. Zeri, the glamorous yet mythic generalist of academic ages past, led a life that wasn't without controversy, recorded in an autobiography that is surprisingly widely read. Zeri was really the last of his breed, the aristocratic art historian, but he was more than a connoisseur, because his work, unlike that of most of his domestic contemporaries, focused on art history in context, rather than art history as a hermetic study. In 1998, when Zeri died, he bequeathed his villa in the Roman countryside, along with his archive of nearly three hundred thousand photographs, to the University of Bologna, one of the many wooing institutions that vied for his inheritance. This was quite a coup for Bologna, which is normally anything but a philanthropic favorite, and since inheriting the collection, the University has created the Federico Zeri Foundation, of which it turns out Professor Ottani Cavina is the director. The Zeri Foundation has been modeled on Villas operated by other universities, the best known of which is I Tatti, the prestigious Florentine Villa, built and furnished by Bernard Berenson, now operated as a cushy post-doctoral retreat by Harvard University, lending substance to the figurative Ivory Tower, an academic Hortus Conclusus. In these places nestled among the green hills of central Italy, the greatest art historians of the age are given free reign, catered lunches, and stipend. These scholars, working in totally artificial disconnect from the rest of the world, are like Nero and playing his lyre, or at least Ansonius, quietly writing poetry on his estate while the Roman empire crumbled around him; they are oblivious, half-crazy geniuses.