VII.viii. Neoclassicism

"Everything in Italy that is particularly elegant and grand ... borders upon insanity and absurdity—or at least is reminiscent of childhood."
- Alexander Herzen

Porfessor Cavina was remarkably open with us as we sped down the A14 in her Audi. We discussed all sorts of topics, many of which pertained to the sunken glory of the University system in Italy, the highs and lows of academic life. She was quite frank about Umberto Eco's somewhat questionable taste when describing his villa near Rimini. "Of course," she said, "it sounds nice, but it is not your normal villa. It is a convent designed in the nineteen-fifties. Concrete and linoleum. He does have rather amusing dinners, though, simply because he knows so many people. Roberto Benignini is often invited, along with his wife, what's-her-name, that nobody likes. Also that actress, Claire Bloom, who played alongside Chaplin in Limelight. She's there sometimes, alert as ever, without even a touch of that faded star disposition. Nick, are you copiloting? Make sure we don't miss the exit…"
    She had offered to drive my friend Matthew and I to Faenza for our class field trip, while our hundred or so classmates took the train. "I was going to take the disabled girl," she told us, "but when she backed out I decided I would content myself with the Canadians instead." Not able to find parking space in downtown Faenza, we were eventually let into the courtyard of Palazzo Milzetti, the object of our field trip. After an incredible yet crowded tour of the Villa's pristine neoclassical interior, she drove us back to Bologna, too.
    Yes, Matthew and I agreed, Professor Cavina had Sprezzatura, that somewhat intangible manifestation of effortless grace, of excellence in every endeavour. She was cosmopolitan yet grounded at the same time, equally comfortable interacting with the greatest academic stars of the age and the most humble of students. She didn't hesitate to treat us as friends, to show interest, to go beyond what most of her colleagues did. She was the real thing.

VII.vii. Lorenzo Lotto

"Not wanting to wander further in my old age, I wanted to leave my soul in this sacred place."
- Lorenzo Lotto

Almost a recluse, Lorenzo Lotto assigned himself to obscurity by working in the Marche. For hundreds of years his reputation remained obscure, though now his genius has been resurrected. The Lotto route takes the traveler inland from the sea to a variety of out of the way towns that happen to house some of the painter's exquisite, quasi-forgotten masterpieces. The history of art is a gamble, and poor old Lotto lost out, at least until recently. Art historians can now rent cars and travel to see his various paintings, so they have amended their texts accordingly. I had been yearning to see Lotto's paintings for a long time, but I took the bus.
    Le Marche seem unusually, if not eerily, laid back for a place that was once an important cultural centre. The area was never dominated by one power centre, as the Veneto or Tuscany came to be. Its uniqueness lies in its natural receptivity to outside influence, a sort of cultural sponge halfway between Venice and Rome, Tuscany and the Adriatic. Urbino, wealthy but never overwhelmingly powerful, really had no native culture of its own, so it imported. Lotto was from Venice, though he, like the region where he spent the most productive years of his life, was never quite comfortable with the mainstream, and his eccentric style is either loved or hated.
    In Recenati, on my first stop, I crossed a priest in the street who asked me, apparently sensing I was not a local, where I was from. "Canada," I said.
    "Wonderful, wonderful. What town are you from in Norway?"
    "Canada…"
    "Yes, Canada. What town?"
    "Toronto."
    "Yes. I once knew a priest from Canada… François. And what brings you here to Recenati? "
    "I'm going to see the Lorenzo Lotto paintings."
    "Ah yes. Do you know that Lotto was a mystic, a great religious man?"
    "Yes, I know."
We continued to talk for a few minutes, but then he said he ought to be on his way to give mass. It was, after all, a Sunday morning.
    From Recenati I moved on to Loreto, the place where Lotto spent his last days in the care of monks, writing in his extraordinarily preserved journal that he wanted to die there. This small hilltop town, plainly visible from the sea, has the distinction of sheltering the Santa Casa, a humble brick house where the Virgin Mary once lived. According to legend, the house was brought from Nazareth by angels who, fearing for its security, finally deposited it in a laurel grove. The legend can be disputed, but recent investigations concluded that this is indeed, brick by brick, a first century B.C. house from Palestine, painstakingly disassembled from its original location and brought here, somehow, in the thirteenth century. Its foundation still exists in Nazareth and matches the structure exactly. As it stands now, the tiny brick room in Loreto is towered over by a magnificent marble basilica, in a typically powerful act of exalting the most divine of things. Still a major pilgrimage sight, crowds of visitors come to stand in the diminutive room where, on a certain day in March an Angel caught a local girl off guard.
    Back in Ancona, one of Italy's most important Adriatic ports, I climbed the Guasco hill, topped by a pristine Romanesque cathedral, to get a view of the ever-busy dockyards below. In a café where I stopped to have a quick lunch of brodetto, a thick seafood soup, a group of Greek truck drivers were having an animated discussion, perhaps unaware that their ancestors had founded this place where they now seem so foreign. Ancona was established by Greeks from Syracuse, and its name is derived from their word for elbow, a reference to the abrupt peninsula that juts out from the sandy Adriatic coastline that is otherwise unbroken for hundreds of kilometers.
    My last stop of the day before returning to Bologna, and perhaps the highlight, was Jesi, a small hilltop city all but forgotten by tourists. Rough and refined at the same time, Jesi was formerly the capital of a small state, and a few jewels of somewhat incongruous architecture point to its lost status. The Castelli di Jesi, eighteen properties once under the town's control, are today renowned for producing Verdicchio, a crisp white wine. I treated myself to a glass of it with my dinner of Vincisgrassi, a local layered pasta dish that is both hearty and delicate, sold on stands in the main street that straddles the ridge over which the town is built.
    But more than Jesi's bustling Sunday evening street scene, famous theatres, or typical cuisine, Lotto's paintings beckoned me here. In a little pinacoteca, unfrequented as any other of the countless museums I had visited that weekend, are six of his paintings, and among them what is unquestionably his most beautiful work, the Trial of Saint Lucy. The painting shows the tribulations of an achingly beautiful and steadfast girl in a yellow dress and red shawl, the idea of virtue herself, condemned to death by the governor Paschasius. Staring the governor straight in the eye with one finger raised in defiance, she swears her loyalty to God and becomes immovable despite the efforts of three young men who forcibly try to displace her. In a beautifully poetic counterweight, we see an African wet-nurse holding back a child eager to run into the crowd. Below the main scene, Lotto shows the events that follow with an underappreciated stroke of genius. Lucy is eventually tied to dozens of bulls in an effort to move her, but even this fails. Eventually, she is burnt alive, still unmoved, still staring ahead with her clear blue eyes, unforgettable in the tiredness and twilight of the closing day.



A Folk Festival in the main street of Loreto


The main square and Basilica in Loreto


A view of the port city of Ancona, from the Duomo


Lorenzo Lotto's depiction of the Trial of Saint Lucy

VII.vi. Tranquillamente Marche

"Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which Nature herself is animated."
- Auguste Rodin

Tranquillamente Marche is the slogan of the tourism promotion board for the Marche region. It seemed a fitting one as I made my way around for the second day to various minor towns on a combination of regional bus routes and century old railway lines. This is not a place for traveling quickly, though careful planning, as always, is the best strategy in successfully unlocking the hidden treasures present but near-forgotten, almost without fail, in every Italian town.
    Being at the mercy of a sparse bus schedule, I left Urbino at six o'clock in the morning for Fabriano, the place where in the twelfth century papermaking was first imported into the West from the Arab world. I was making my way along the Gothic Route, a self-guided art tour that the local tourism board had invented in order to draw people inland from the pull of the Adriatic. Its loose theme was florid gothic art from the fifteenth century, less relaxing but more varied than the kilometers of continuous sand that form the Marchesian coast. Despite these efforts at promoting medieval art, I still felt like the only tourist in the Marche that day, and moreover one who wasn't contributing to the tourism sector in any substantial way. Continuing on my route, I went from Fabriano to San Severino, then to Tolentino, the burial place of the Dominican Saint Nicholas (as opposed to Saint Nicholas Bishop of Bari). His tombstone is enshrined in the beautiful Capellone, a huge vaulted chapel entirely covered in frescoes depicting his life of preaching, almsgiving, and assorted good works. Like numerous other such shrines in Italy, Tolentino attracts a strange assortment of weekend pilgrims, many of whom couldn't care less about the frescoes in the Capellone, valuing instead what they serve to exhalt. Itinerant clergy, old frogs-in-the-holy-water-stoop types, and guitar toting gangs of catholic youth, and me.
    I arrived in Macerata, a vibrant hilltop University town, after the sun had set. The passeggiata there was particularly lively, the rather stark, stony appearance of the place altered by an admixture of bohemian students, matrons, and elementary school students. This was to be my last stop of the day before making my way to Ancona, where I had booked a room at the youth hostel. Just off the main piazza in Macerata, I happened upon a ridiculous live auction that seemed almost Dickensian in its dishonesty, something out of the Victorian world. In a tiny, packed room, the gaudiest oil paintings were being sold by an auctioneer who had no qualms about lauding these works to the skies and displaying his displeasure at the rather unremarkable prices being fetched.
    "Ladies and gentlemen," the man belted out indignantly, "I just don't know what to say here. I don't know what to tell you. This painting is clearly worth much more than the reserve of six hundred Euros (it was an awful florescent-pastel view of La Spezia, of the kind that hang in lesser hotel corridors); another by the same painter was sold in Rome just last month for six times as much, and it was only fifty percent larger. It is a travesty, ladies and gentlemen, that in our fair town these beautiful things are not appreciated. Wait, you know what, I am willing to halve the reserve price. Just this once, I will take the extraordinary step of reducing the reserve price. Three hundred Euros. The frame alone is worth that much (he tapped the spray-gilded frame loudly), but we're not selling frames here, ladies and gentlemen, we are selling quality oil paintings." The crowd looked unimpressed.

---

    Upon arriving in Ancona, I had a bit of a run in with the Carabinieri at the train station. As I was about to make my way to the youth hostel, a squad of five friendly officers asked me for identification; a routine check. I politely showed them my Canadian passport, at which they smiled. "Bravo ragazzo," one of them said, "this will only take a minute." While they were radioing in my details to make sure I had my residency permit, one of the officers offered to show me how to get to the youth hostel. Upon returning, his colleagues still weren't able to confirm my identity over the radio. "Are you sure you have a residency permit, sir?" they asked me.
    "Of course, I mean, I went to the police station when I arrived, and I applied, and… " Just then I remembered that my residency permit was applied for with my Swiss passport, and that, furthermore, I had neglected to actually pick it up from the police station once it was ready. I became somewhat agitated at the prospect of having to explain this to them.
    "And what?" They were getting more suspicious.
    "And, well, I think my permesso is on another passport.
    "Another passport?"
    "Yes, I'm also a Swiss citizen. My study permit is on that passport."
    "I see. Let's just step into the office here, so we can figure this out more easily." Fearing some kind of diplomatic incident, I quickly offered up my University of Bologna identification, my Sala Borsa library card, and anything else that might corroborate my legitimacy. Still not finding me registered in their computer, and all of them remarking on how strange this was, their supervisor told them to let me go. "Let's not make mountains out of molehills," he said. "Let him be on his way, but," turning to look at me, "you'll go down to the station first thing next week and sort this out?"
    "Of course," I said, and with that I left the Carabinieri, wondering why on earth they would be so concerned with the comings and goings of a skinny, mild-mannered, only slightly out of order art history student from Toronto.


The town of San Severino, set in a typical Marche landscape, still dormant in the mid-March sun

VII.v. The House where Raphael was Born

"Here's one in whom Nature feared--faint at such vying -
Eclipse while he lived, and decease at his dying."
- Thomas Hardy

After a long day I had finally reached Urbino, a genteel place lost in the hilly inland reaches of Le Marche, in truth hardly worthy of being called a city. After the departure of my visiting relatives and a rather uneventful intervening week, I had decided to leave Bologna for three days. As usual, I was seeking out the excitement of the past. Urbino's obscure diminutiveness, its inaccessibility, can be misleading; for a few bright years this was a centre of culture unlike anything that had existed before. The historian Kenneth Clark once referred to the city and its illustrious court, the gracious conversations of which are immortalized in Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, as a high point of Western civilization. A good part of the modern world was born here, Raphael Sanzio being among it.
    Giovanni Santi, Raphael's father, had a house built here for his family and included, on the ground floor, space for his burgeoning workshop. He himself was never destined to become a great painter, but he did his best, and his work for the dukes of Montefeltro, the greatest of patrons, didn't go unrewarded. The house is sizeable, sparsely furnished only due to the losses of time, and is lit by large windows. In the courtyard there is still the stone on which he, perhaps in the company of his young son, ground pigments and mixed paint. In the end, Giovanni hadn't done so badly. Through a bitter mixture of agony and fortune, he died when his son was just eleven, and so the young Raphael was apprenticed to Perugino, and was given a training that his father could never have matched. By the time he was twenty-five, Raphael was one of the greatest painters who has ever lived.
    Whether it was chance alone that saw to Raphael growing up here at such a time, or whether, as most like to believe, it was something more, there is no doubt that the few streets that make up Urbino, and the townhouse where he lived, have been witness to some extraordinary things. The room where he was born is bare save for a small fresco of a mother and child, a thing as touching as it is debated by art historians; is this gentle recognition of motherhood the work of a devout father or of a young, gifted son? A nearby plaque reminds the reader not to belittle his surroundings. The most divine of things, after all, are often set forth in the humblest of disguises.
    This is the staring point for devout pilgrims of Urbino's most famous son, the beginning of a journey that ends exactly thirty seven years later on a deathbed in Rome. Raphael died on Good Friday in 1520 at the same age, according to some, as Christ. Something more than mere mythology, Raphael's life has been romanticized for centuries and a nondescript house in Urbino is at the centre of the romance.

---

    I slept at a pension next door to the Casa di Rafaello, in a room furnished no more lavishly. It had been a tiring journey, since in the same day I had first visited Pesaro, a pleasant seaside town just on the border between the Marche and Romagna. Like many Adriatic towns in Italy, the seaside itself, forlorn and lined with concrete bathing houses and pastel coloured hotels, isn't nearly as attractive as the older historic centres somewhat removed from the beach. Pesaro's real treasure though, at least in my eyes, is a huge altarpiece by Giovanni Bellini, the closest Venetian counterpart to Raphael. Bellini's work solicits almost without fail an intensely emotional response, one that begs a comparison between the two masters.
    I had long been in love with Raphael's Madonnas, that is sure; they are among the most sweetly seductive things in the whole history of art. As an adolescent, I could never think of anything as wondrous as those precious hours spent at the Louvre, staring at La Belle Jardinière, with her softly averted eyes and tousled braids. She was the benchmark of my half-serious yearnings. Yet since arriving in Italy my passion for Bellini, for his version of the oft-repeated mother and child, had only grown, and that morning, in the little museum in Pesaro, I think I decided why.
    No art historian will ever tell you what he or she thinks personally of a painting, and would shudder to write or to read about passion in any context, but for as much as I can help it I am not an art historian, and I will tell you what I feel. Raphael's women, La Belle Jardinière for one, are, undoubtedly and incredibly, life-changingly beautiful. They are perfectly real, vivid, painted with god-like tenderness and realism. Yet, in the end, they are nothing other than pretty Roman girls, because they are so perfectly believable in all their beauty.
    Bellini, for his part, makes some concession to poetry where Raphael works in only the most eloquent of prose. If you stare long enough at a Bellini, besides growing faint, you will notice something peculiar; his women, with their dark open eyes and long noses, are too beautiful to exist in the flesh but too realistic to be mere invention. Yes, they are perfectly rendered with the virtuoso near-photographic precision one comes to expect from the Venetian master, but they have an unbelievably all their own that melds into their realism and enhances their mystery. They are the hodegetria, the classic eastern Byzantine queen, updated for the nascent modern world. One would never cross them in the street, because it is simply impossible that they could exist, though when you stare at them they might seem as realistic as a photograph. This is the genius of Bellini. This is why, in Pesaro on that day in my mind, he surpassed even the divinity of Raphael.
    Julia Kristeva, the semiotician who I had so extraordinarily met, along with Umberto Eco, a few weeks earlier at Professor Cavina's Palazzo, wrote an influential essay in feminist theory called "Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini." In it, she explores the notions of maternity as expressed by the painter, complex notions that the man modified throughout his life as he progressed from bachelor to husband to father. It is interesting that Kristeva didn't wish to explore Raphael's work, as the latter's paintings often serve, despite what I mentioned above, as a starting point for contemporary feminist critiques of idealized motherhood. Perhaps Kristeva too was thinking in some way of what I had grasped that morning in Pesaro.

---

    I thought about these things as I lay in bed at the pension in Urbino. About Raphael, about Bellini, about whether or not I put too much stock in the past, and then I fell asleep.


Pomodoro's Golden Sphere, by the Sea in Pesaro


Giovanni Bellini's Pesaro altarpiece


The Room where Raphael was born


The Casa di Rafaello, from the street

VII.iv. Morandi

"I believe the educational task possible for the figurative arts, particularly at the present time, is to communicate the images and feelings that the visible world arouses in us."
- Giorgio Morandi

Today Tony and Gabrielle especially wanted to see the Morandi Museum, located right in the centre of Bologna. Giorgio Morandi was Bologna's most representative modernist painter, and managed to achieve fame painting nothing more than still lives of the same few objects, each work's originality being expressed in terms of balance and lighting as opposed to composition. It takes a certain patience and a good eye for subtlety to look, in his work, beyond the obvious monotony, but once this is achieved his work takes on an entirely new meaning.
    Yesterday we had been to Ravenna, to see the mosaics. Tony, a painter, was especially interested in seeing them as some of his work had involved using the technique. The next day, while I remained in Bologna to attend class, the others were to go to Bondeno, a town near Ferrara, where Gabrielle, a photographer, would soon be exhibiting some of her work in a show entitled Seno Guerriero: Images of the Amazons, the myth of the armed woman from the XVIIth century to the present day. Gabrielle's work was to be shown, it would turn out, not only in Bondeno but also in several other Italian traveling shows. Today was our last full day in Bologna, then, and so we went to the Morandi museum, where we examined the collection of several hundred paintings and a reconstruction of his original studio that he left to the city of his birth.

VII.iii. The Restaurant Circuit

"When you hear about Bolognese cuisine, be respectful, because it deserves as much. It might be somewhat heavy, due to the climate, but it is succulent and healthy, such that it is more common to live to the age of eighty or ninety in Bologna than elsewhere."
- Pellegrino Artusi

I had recovered, in a way, from the extraordinary experience that was the previous night's dinner by the time the final lecture given by Julia Kristeva had ended. Back among the faceless ranks of students, I was able to observe her with a much-revised point of view. Eco, having to catch a plane to Paris, had vanished, and now it was Kristeva alone lecturing from the high table against the backdrop of an immense fresco in one of the university's grander halls. Leaving the lecture, I made my way across town to the Palace Hotel, where, never a dull moment, I had a rendez-vous with my latest set of visitors, who had arrived from France that afternoon just.
    Alain, Denise, Tony, and Gabrielle are bon vivants, to my advantage, and their stay in Bologna turned out to be very culinary in nature. I had, of course, experimented with Bolognese cuisine on my own, in my diminutive kitchen, but much of the Emilian cuisine is notoriously complex, and difficult if not impossible to master with just a few basic Ikea implements, coupled with typical student frugality.
    In the past few months I had resigned myself to eating rather simply, though still well, indulging in the occasional packet of San Daniele prosciutto. The constraints of my kitchen were beginning to show themselves, though the purchase of a new microwave had led to some interesting new possibilities. The two principle uses of this new appliance, bought on sale at Pam for forty Euros, are heating up pasta and, surprisingly, baking chocolate cakes. Living in the very centre of Bologna, it makes little sense for me to eat in a restaurant, and I even try to avoid it, knowing that eating out too often as a student breeds bad habits.
    Being invited for dinner, however, is a different story, and so, for four pleasant days, my relatives treated me to great meals at some of the city's more legendary restaurants, such as Da Nello, where house specialties such as deep fried artichokes and foot-thick Mortadella sausages are called up to the dining room in a dumb-waiter, and the Rosteria Luciano, a veritable Bolognese institution with its wood-paneled walls and bowtie clad waiters.
    So, like the flavour of a well tended Bolognese sauce, this city only gradually reveals itself. Even after six months, there is still much left to discover.

VII.ii. The Island of the Day Before

"I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us."
- Umberto Eco

I knew that it had been a good idea to wear a tie as soon as the smartly dressed butler, wearing a white serving shirt with gold buttons, answered the door and took my coat. Stunned by my surroundings, I gazed around as Professor Cavina walked over to greet me. Professor Cavina lives in a palace. I was more or less transfixed. Putti fluttered above us, frescoed into the twenty-foot high vaulted ceilings. The study, into which I entered, had an eighteenth century pianoforte and a gentle Madonna and child, no later than 1600, hanging above it in a beautiful period frame. The bookshelves were lined with plush leather bound volumes from the seventeenth century, bookended by Greek and Etruscan vases. On a desk were family photos taken in the most exotic of locales. Several of these, which I recognized from class, included Federico Zeri sitting in his beloved garden at Mentana, or posing next to a windswept stone head in Syria, like something out of Shelley's Ozymandias.
    This was, without contest, the most beautiful private home to which I had ever been invited. It far outdid the trappings of the mansions of even my Geneva relatives, places that struggle at being opulent while maintaining their grim Calvinism all the same. This was an hôtel particulier, that peculiarly Franco-Italian idea of an urban palace, not separated by a manicured garden from the city, but instead contiguous to it, even part of it; how often I had walked through the street-level arcades of this particular building in the past, without even being aware of what was hidden above. Now, I was in the heart of it, the rich, welcoming scholar's womb of Bologna, thanks to the generosity of a woman I hardly knew. I felt accepted by this city, perhaps only as a small man in an entourage, un petit grand homme dans un rond, but nevertheless I did feel accepted, finally lifted out of unbecoming anonymity.
    I handed Professor Cavina her gift, a recording of Bach's French Suites performed by Glen Gould and a copy of Contrapposto, the student-produced art history review I had helped put together last year. "I love his Goldberg variations," she said, "oh, and this looks interesting, too…. Come now, I want you to meet some people," she added as she led me into the wood paneled library where, on a low white leather couch, two people were engaged in an intense discussion, in French. About a dozen people looked on as they timidly tried to make their own conversation. No other students, and Matthew was still only on his way, caught in the snow. I was shown forth.
    "Umberto, Julia, ceci est un de mes élèves," she interjected, "Nick… Herman, that's right, isn't it? He's the editor of a magazine."
    "Well, not exact…" I tried to explain as Cavina left me alone, crouching next to a coffee table in front of the two sages.
    "Oh yes, I remember doing something much the same with Tel Quel." Kristeva added nonchalantly.
    Eco's response, on the other hand, was shorter still. He didn't say a word. Just looked at me, nodded slowly, smiled slightly, and resumed the discussion that my presence had interrupted. I tried to follow their conversation for a few awkward minutes, as they would occasionally look my way for an assenting "oui," though in truth I had very little idea what they were discussing. Soon enough, another man came along to say hello, and I felt it opportune to discreetly pull away from the group. I had come away relatively unscathed from a conversation I never dreamed I would ever have.
    Soon after this Matthew arrived, giving me someone to talk with more freely, and it was announced that dinner, a buffet, was ready at our leisure. The dining room that we entered shortly was a large rectangular space paved in terrazzo and inset with a cupola supported by four giant ionic columns. On the ceiling were further neoclassical frescoes depicting Venus, Adonis, and other myths. Hung on the walls, above a pale blue wainscoting, were large seventeenth century paintings with elaborate carved and gilded frames. The largest one, about two metres wide, was an early school of a Veronese piece, the Magdalene washing the feet of Christ. There was also a portrait of Saint Jerome that looked uncannily like a Ribera, and some moody Dutch landscapes.
    As we sat in divans around the edge of the room, along with Matthew and a relatively young professor of his I began speaking to a distinguished looking elderly man. Asked if he was a professor, he replied that he taught on the side but, no, that he was in the book business instead. As we only gradually discovered, this man was the former chief of Feltrinelli, the largest bookstore chain in the country, and one of the most influential players among its publishing industry. He seemed to find it slightly amusing that we didn't know who he was, as I'm sure many of the twenty or so other people present that evening thought as well.
    The meal was excellent, consisting of a pasta dish (orechietti in a pancetta, asparagus, and rapini sauce), polenta, mixed fried vegetables, fresh pea and cuttlefish minestra, and a fennel salad made by Professor Cavina herself. A fortified wine from the Cavina's country property, a place that can only be imagined, was served along with kiwis from the same property, together with chocolate mousse, tiramisu, and pineapple for dessert. The dishware, in an act I was now coming to appreciate as synonymous with the Cavina name, was the same blue as the walls. These dishes were served to us both by the white-shirted butler and, in what was perhaps a pastiche-like act, Mr. Cavina, whom we learned was among the most famous surgeons in Bologna, and thus more than complicit in the collected wonders around him.

---

    Despite all the distractions that evening offered, from the fourteen books I counted in the library's Raphael section to the Légion d'honneur pin that Julia Kristeva was wearing, I was able by my training to absorb all the details of those few hours into a crisp screenplay, like an unfolding painting that simply cannot be forgotten. I observed Dr. Eco most carefully, and concluded by affirming that his demeanour is not one that could come close to equaling his published intellect. I wasn't disappointed by this, or disillusioned, because I have come to learn that the most renowned academics rarely mirror their work in elegance, compassion, or truth. Still, Eco had an unmistakable grandeur about him. Hunched over at Professor Cavina's dining room table, or inelegantly slouched on one of her chairs, Eco was still the center around which others gravitated. He has a commanding presence, but it is closed and gruff like the high walls of a castle. Him and Kristeva and a few others, including a visiting Irishman bespectacled in a Joycean fashion, continued to converse most of the evening in French, the koine of their generation, in a closed and confident way. All evening long Eco chewed on an unlit cigar stub, obviously struggling with his famous twenty year long attempt at quitting tobacco. At eleven o'clock, when he announced he was leaving and the evening began to end, Professor Cavina had her son Cesare walk him home, due to the rather treacherous conditions outside. "We wouldn't want anything to happen to him," she told us, as he waddled out the door. It saddened me somewhat to see him like this, because I remember reading The Name of the Rose, being awestruck at this author's understanding of a world that I too had adopted as my own. I had never felt such empathy, such authorial connection since I had read Augustine's Confessions when I was fifteen. But Augustine too in his old age became senile, irritable, even inelegant; this is to be expected, not lamented by an awed young student.

---

    That evening was like a dream, a strange extra-temporal gathering to which I had somehow been party. Bound up in it was all the beautiful richness of a past that is perpetually dying. In my eyes that Thursday's dinner was a glorious parting feast, perhaps one of many, for the mythic scholars that attended it. They are a dying breed, for their world of symbols, meaning and logic is fast disappearing. I'll inherit all I can from them one day and be left with nothing else. It won't be sad, but poignant, wonderful and all consuming. The humanist world, the world of beautiful lives, Umberto's world, is fast dissolving around Professor Cavina's palace; even he is falling away from it. Like with every glorious, exploding end, all we can do is enjoy the finale, pick up the pieces, and continue on our way.

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."