http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i39/39b01601.htm
From the issue dated June 6, 2008
Academics in Paradise
By PETER MONAGHAN
Bogliasco, Italy
The Academic Life
You are looking over the moonlit Mediterranean from the veranda of a stately villa on the Italian Riviera, through a stand of pines that incline toward a sea smooth in the dusk.
Dinner is over. You savor, still, a surpassing-fine minestrone prepared by a talented resident chef. Then came cuttlefish, potatoes, and spinach, followed by a light dessert of pineapple drizzled with Grand Marnier. You've sampled fine wines of the region, of course. Now you try a shot of Santa Maria al Monte, an herbal digestif that cures what it does not curl. The acrid tonic is found only here, where the hills that drop from the Apennines meet the rugged but imaginatively domesticated coast around the city of Genoa.
It almost slips your mind why this setting, home to the Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanities, is so conducive to the study of arts and letters.
But you sit on a sofa and relish another of a month of evenings with an international cast of colleagues. Conversation ranges through the reveries of Marcel Proust, Ligurian separatist sentiment since the federation of Italy, and the rather racy poetry of an obscure Genoese writer, Olindo Guerrini.
All that, at least, might have occurred to you had you been here during a recent month at the center — known simply as "Bogliasco" to the cognoscenti of the now numerous (and stunningly appointed) academic and artistic retreat centers scattered about the globe.
Telling you about Guerrini would have been Jeremy Dibble, a University of Durham musicologist and music historian, and a talented pianist and vocalist. He mentions the writer in connection with his project here, a critical biography of the eclectic Italian composer Michele Esposito (1855-1929), who pioneered Irish art song by incorporating Hibernian strains into his otherwise-Italian compositions.
The effusive Dibble has not resisted rousing a few game souls in the party to renditions of Neapolitan songs — the hackneyed ones that gondoliers in Venice sing because it is those that most convey Italianness to tourists. But perhaps the singers were simply engaging in giddy fun — a parody of having so fine a time in a style of life they may never again attain.
Eight academics and artists, guests for a month here at Bogliasco, find quickly why it has become one of the most desired of European retreats. It may not be as much bandied as Bellagio — all the name that the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study and Conference Center needs — but, as a relatively new center, now in its 12th year, it has many enthusiastic advocates.
"I feel like a mosquito in a blood bank here," says Dibble of his productivity — a whole chapter in the first week alone. "Absolutely," agrees Willard Spiegelman, a professor of English at Southern Methodist University. "There are no requirements to deal with the banalities of ordinary life. You don't go anywhere, buy anything, cook for yourself. … You don't clean up."
The book he is completing under contract to Farrar, Straus and Giroux — its working title: "Pursued by Happiness: An Investigation of Pleasure" — makes him something of a specialist in contentment, and he says that being here has certainly continued his history of it. He professes to have spent virtually his whole life in a good mood, but never more than during his month here. "The physical comforts of the place increase one's sense of well-being," he says, "and for many people like me, a sense of well-being is conducive to good academic work."
It would be, perhaps, only the rankest malcontent who could grouse while sitting on the porch that Spiegelman has shared with a companion (spouses and partners are invited to Bogliasco, and spoiled right along with the fellows). He can view the Mediterranean even from his study. Or he can venture down the walkways that plunge to the sea.
The Liguria center came into existence when the artistic children of the late Swiss-born businessman and art collector, Roberto Biaggi, wished to celebrate their father's cultural interests. The president of the center's governing body, the Bogliasco Foundation, is James Harrison, a retired professor of music and composition at Hunter College whose wife is one of the benefactor's daughters, Marina Biaggi.
The center's stated mission is to reward outstanding scholars and artists in at least midcareer with a quiet, pampered month of contemplation and an ideal work setting. Fifty fellows come here each year, for one month each, from September to December, or February to May, in cohorts of eight — with spouses and partners, if they wish.
The center's director, Anna Maria Quaiat, who cared for the Biaggi children when they were young, oversees a staff for whom nothing seems too much trouble. They trim hedges before dawn, prepare and serve meals, and bake specialty pastries of the region to stock kitchens with snacks.
For the first week that each cohort of fellows is here, Pasquale Pesce, Bogliasco's amiable director of development, is in attendance to orient the visitors. He directed Bellagio from 1992 to 1998 and still teaches part time in Rome at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies, run by a group of American colleges. Thanks to spending considerable time in the United States as a young man, and to various nonprofit pursuits, Pesce, a specialist in the sociology of organizations, speaks excellent, rather stately English. He offers a wealth of knowledge of Italian life, and he reveals, little by little, a surprising biography.
It turns out that he grew up on his well-known archaeologist father's digs. He then began his adult life as an actor — not to name-drop, but he may in the flow of conversation mention some rather renowned thespians who are old friends.
He is a walking compendium of tips on making the most of time here. He knows where in Genoa to find the best linguini nere (squid cooked in its own ink, served over linguini) and lightly pan-fried acciughe (fresh anchovies) — at Da Vittorio, down one of the city's narrow, baffling passageways. He can disentangle Italian political intrigue for fellows who care to tackle it, and he seems able to discourse on every wine or vineyard in Italy.
The research center is a short walk from the village of Bogliasco. Lanes, staircases, and squares in the village and along the coast convert every cranny to human use on a human scale. Serpentine walks take strollers toward Genoa to the north, past buildings with the painted trompe l'oeil facades that have created illusion here since Roman times. It all inspires Spiegelman's completion of chapters on such topics as the pleasures of walking in foreign cities. And it moves him to proclaim that cheerfulness — with recourse to neither psychopharmacology nor religion — is given too little credit for generating artistic insights: "There's a pre-Freudian equation of creativity with melancholy, even though the myth was long ago exploded that depression is tied to creativity."
Can life here be so tirelessly gratifying, conducive to study, offering all the collegiality that academe promised before sober reality intervened? Can there be no tense moments or hurt feelings among eight academics and artists, all wedded equally to their endeavors, but not all equally humble about it?
Well, says the optimistic Spiegelman, "even if one doesn't feel equally sympathetic to everyone who's here, one sees them only for a couple of hours a day."
Some of the fellows are not academics — or not any more, at least — and for them scholarly contention and cavil may make a nice change. "I have marvelous, stimulating company of really nice people," says C.K. Stead, one of New Zealand's most eminent men of letters, who retired from university teaching a decade ago to a life of contemplation and writing. Retirement alone brought him great peace of mind, he says, but here his sense of purpose has ratcheted up: "I've got a lot of work done and at the same time feel I'm on holiday. It's a dream." In his time at Bogliasco, he polished up his collected poems for release by Carcanet in Britain, while also completing a literary autobiography titled Book Self: The Reader as Writer and the Writer as Critic.
He is just back from the dip in the Mediterranean that he and his wife, Kay, take each morning, by the village church. The climate here permits swimming much of the year.
Do not fear, advise Bogliasco fellows, that a month of being treated like a doge — with none of the normal academic distractions like meetings, office hours, and corrosive gossip or such domestic ones as shopping, cooking, or walking the dog — will encourage you only to slacken off, sit in a village square, get sunburned. …
"The immersion that's been possible is really valuable and welcome," says Anthony Alofsin, a professor of architecture, art, and art history who has come here from the University of Texas at Austin to complete a novella and a book on Italian stone building ornaments.
"The environment here is not something everyone could lapse into, but it's something I seem happy to be doing. I live in Texas, so being by the Mediterranean is like being by a watery life force."
Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
