VII.i. An Invitation

"Nobody with a dream should come to Italy.
No matter how dead and buried the dream is thought to be,
in Italy it will rise and walk again."
- Elizabeth Spencer

After a certain point, life in Italy evaporates into a sort of undeserved dream that isn't directly connected with what should be a waking reality. Living here seems only to intensify most of the extraordinary things in my life have very little to do with my own actions, things that plague me and lift me up all the same. I wouldn't consider myself a determinist in the least, but all the swinging fortune, with which Italy is so generous in heaping upon art history students, never ceases to come to a head for those who have fallen into its arms.
    This was my reaction to the first day of March, when Professor Cavina invited me, and my friend Matthew, to dinner.
    Cavina had grown on me from her first impression which had been already a good one. We had exchanged a few words, maybe, most of them during rather awkward cross-examinations the foreign students had to undergo during her class. I had thanked her for being so welcoming to us, which at least made her aware of my name, though I doubt she would have been able to recognize my face. Nonetheless, her lectures pleased me in that they related to the larger world of Art History, the world of personalities, anecdotes and intrigues. As she had spoken at length last week about the late Federico Zeri, this week she reminded us that we had to be aware of extra-curricular things taking place around us. "Just today for example," she exclaimed," we have some world-renowned scholars in Bologna. Mr. Umberto Eco, who I'm sure you all know, is hosting an annual lecture series at which Julia Kristeva, the famous feminist scholar, will be giving four lectures. You, as art history students, need to be aware of these things!"
    Her lecture, which as usual began only after a series of this and other lengthy tangential discourses, focused on the beginnings of neoclassical art. She had me, to my great embarrassment, name and locate David's Death of Barra in front of the entire class, then proceed to complement me on my pronunciation of the Avignon, exclaiming that I must be French. Then, wanting to point out a detail the slide, asked herself "Dovè il bastone di Longhi?" My confused classmates and I had no idea of what she was talking about, until she reached behind the chalkboard and brought out an enormous bamboo stick, at least three metres in length. This, evidently, was the late Roberto Longhi's bastone, the pointing stick of arguably the most famous Italian art historian of the twentieth century. He had used it, teaching in this very hall, until his death in 1970, and now it was a sort of domestic historical monument, as so many things in Italy tend to be. I had half a mind to steal it, or at least a small part of it, knowing full well that if I brought it back to my home university it would be framed on a library wall and certainly not kept in use.
    Before I was questioned, and before Longhi's bastone had been introduced, however, as I was waiting for class to begin in the cramped wood-paneled Aula Interna of Palazzo Poggi, I noticed my friend Matthew, who is also in the class, speaking with Professor Cavina at the front of the hall, but took little notice and soon enough the class began.
    I waited for Matthew at the door as the class ended. Eventually he made it out of the hall.
"Guess what?"
    "What?" I answered.
    "Professor Cavina had invited us for dinner at her place on Thursday."
    "What? You're kidding. Like, just us?"
    "No, she said there'll be some other people… Julia Krsiteva, and…
    "And who else?"
    "…and Umberto Eco."
    "Oh."