VIII.vii. The Invention of Celebrity

"A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts."
- Joshua Reynolds

This time, Professor Cavina didn't take the Audi. She actually had ridden her bicycle to the station, and climbed aboard the rickety regionale to Ferrara with the rest of us. At the ungodly hour of eight fifteen, our entire class of a hundred students was off to the Reynolds exhibit that was currently on in Ferrara. This was our latest fieldtrip in Professor Cavina's ambitious program, which she tried so valiantly to implement in spite of the often counter-productive inner workings of the vast University that surrounds her.
    I was with my mother, who had principally come on the trip in order to meet the famous Professoressa, when we bumped into her. "Visiting Nick for a second time? You are worse than an Italian mother!" she said, only partly joking. In her usual frenzied state, she excused herself from morning chitchat in order to study, to cram for her tour. This is something the common professor would try to hide, try to conceal beneath a veneer of preparedness. Cavina, the real thing, had no qualms about doing a bit of last minute underlining on the train.
    "Nick, tell people to meet on the corner," she said to me once we had arrived at Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, the venue for the show, "I have to go get a coffee." A few minutes later, she re-appeared at the intersection facing the Palazzo, and, unfazed by the rush hour traffic, proceeded to introduce our class to the wonders of this renaissance architectural gem, a palace faced with 12,500 blocks of diamond-shaped marble. Just as quickly, she brought us into the exhibit and changed subjects completely to talk of Reynolds, who himself would probably be spinning in his grave at the sight of his beloved aristocracy hanging together on the walls of some draughty Italian mansion, gawked at by hordes of irreverent students.
    I had to bear the brunt this time of Professor Cavina's constant and unwarranted worry about her English skills. She would constantly turn to me expectantly while giving the tour, making sure that her pronunciation was acceptable, even as she struggled to find Italian equivalents to terms such as "bird brained," which she used to describe Reynold's airier female models, and "armchair traveler," her epithet for many a kilted Scotsman posing imperiously in front of some Roman ruin or another. Altogether, her use of English is probably seen by my classmates as something quite modern; while many Italian academics purport to be fluent in English, few can even read it, and so she is a rare exception, especially for her generation, weaned on the elegant diphthongs of dying Francophone cultural hegemony. Now, Bad English was replacing Good French in Italy, and Joshua Reynold's portraits were a case in point.