Though the villa and grounds had once seen better times, I learned quickly that coming to the academy was an honor, and for most of the fellows there, a competitively driven one. Among them were pre- and postdoctoral classicists and art historians, architects and architectural scholars, conservationists, city planners, experts in Italian Renaissance literature as well as aspirants in the field of Italian studies, who had been culled from the finest universities in the United States and, in some cases, Europe: Harvard, Princeton, and Yale graduates were well represented at the academy, but even when they came from other universities, there could be no doubt as to their drive and brilliance, for they were the crème de la crème of young scholarship. Added to this mix were returning former fellows, now tenured professors on sabbatical from some of the most prestigious universities in the country, to take up half- and full-year residencies devoted to studies and writing, and, as well, the occasional invited honored guest.
During my year at the academy, of this group, the two most notable were Dorothea Rockburne, the artist, and one Leon Krier, architect, town planning theorist, and Prince Charles’s right-hand man when it came to London architectural conservation, with whom I became rather friendly — mainly because the two of us had a shared interest in fumetti, comics, which took us all over Rome to visit shops.
On the other side, among the nonacademics, in a separate class unto themselves, were the fellows in the arts — painting, photography, sculpture, and music. In my year, they were a rather talented but temperamentally uneven group that included one burly older painter, who, having applied to the academy some fifteen times over the years, arrived with a smoldering contempt for the spoiled brat “careerists” surrounding him. He resembled, incidentally, a Thomas Nast rendering of Saint Nicholas, down to his bulbous nose and gray scraggly beard, though he, dressed usually in a lumberjack’s shirt and coveralls, hardly ever behaved in a jolly manner with anyone — and remained particularly belligerent toward me.
When I’d first turned up at the academy, I’d made the mistake of mentioning to him that my Rome Prize had come out of the blue, awarded to me from afar, from within the mysterious star chambers of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, as I’d never applied for it; and though I’d said this so as to separate myself from the ultracompetitive folks there, for I’d never hustled anyone (or ever would) in my life, nor had I ever been one to “look around a room” to make possible connections, it did not go well with this man, who, until we became friends, made my life and that of the other fellows generally miserable. A perpetual presence at the downstairs bar just off the main salone, he tended to linger there without company, as most people, once seeing him, changed their plans. It seems that he was mainly a confrontation junkie, insults (“I’ve got more talent in my pinkie than everyone else here put together”) his general means of communication. But he must have also been crazy — his paintings, mainly portraiture and Roman cityscapes that were constructed by mounting blotchy dashes of paint one upon the other, seemed the work of a madman (at least to me). One day, when I’d shown up at the bar with a nice-looking woman I’d met in Rome, he nearly proved it, almost pushing me over an edge; ogling her body lasciviously, he leaned close to me, asking if I could do him a favor.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like letting me fuck her,” he said, pointing her way.
I was holding a beer mug at the moment, and if not for the fact that I would have been kicked out of the academy for good, I would have punched him in the face with it.
But my dealings with him were the worst of that stay, aside from certain moments of the ghastly, unbridled snobbery I occasionally encountered. After my years at TDI, never a hotbed of intellectual activity, and with my plebeian education (“City College? How quaint”), I was unaccustomed to academic speak and the incredibly long-winded conversations I’d overhear at the dining room tables. Though I enjoyed attending the academy lectures, in which one could get up and leave, I found that certain people were best avoided, and, along the way, I may have offended, without intending to, more than a few of them.
Still, in those days I made the acquaintance of a photographer in her mid-thirties named Barbara Beany, an expat who had married an Italian, whose roundish and expressive face always seemed swollen, her cheeks of a deep rouge coloration: Working for the academy, she had sought me out, and while I hadn’t been aware of just why, I always felt an inexplicable kinship with her, as if I knew much more about her than was possible. But I could never put my finger on it, until I learned that she suffered from bad kidneys. A sunny personality, despite her difficulties, we’d often stroll the academy’s back gardens, talking about her life in Italy and my book, which seemed to have touched her. Ever so quiet and gentle in her manner, I realize now that she, indeed, knew that her days were numbered.
Leon Krier and I were friendly enough that he invited me to London for New Year’s. My first autumn in Italy, we’d palled around quite a bit in Rome. On the evening of one of that city’s greatest (and rare) snowstorms, we had driven down to the Vatican, its piazza abandoned, and gone hiking in a state of elation through its threefoot-high drifts, talking about the monumentality of its architecture (in fact, we’d drive around Rome to obscure hill towns discussing nothing else). We’d make countryside excursions, his wife, Rita Wolfe, a painter, often joining us. But as I said before, we mainly caroused about for books. He’d invited me to London out of pure kindness, and though I had come down with an awful flu (my annual friend), I kept my assignation, having booked tickets on Ethiopian Airlines, the cheapest fare I could find. The day I left for London, I was on my way out to Fiumicino on a bus when traffic completely stopped on the highway. Suddenly, dozens of police cars, sirens blaring, went whizzing by, followed by ambulances, then military vehicles. As we waited, someone listening to a portable radio mentioned that some kind of attack had taken place in the airport. A few hours later when we were allowed to proceed, I arrived at a chaotic scene — hundreds of people and airline employees wandering about in a daze (so it seemed to me). At one side of the terminal, near the El Al and TWA counters, large paneled screens were being wheeled into place, while airport workers in janitorial coveralls stood on ladders, steam-blasting blood and other matter off the bullet-pocked walls. Even then I had no clear idea of what had happened, nor would I until, after an endless wait, my late-morning flight made it into London’s Heathrow, sometime after ten that night, when, as I recall, tanks were lining the airport route. Only when I made it over to Leon’s place at Belsize Park and turned on the “telly” did I learn that I’d witnessed the aftermath of the terrorist attack known as the Rome Massacre.
Mainly I enjoyed myself: I learned to play something that vaguely resembled tennis on a court outside the academy library. I’d whack at balls with an ebullient kitchen helper named Rocco, later the operator of an ice cream truck in Rome—“Ciao, Oscareeno,” he’d call out to me, ringing its bells. Every morning, despite my afternoon habit of smoking, I’d go jogging around the scenic grounds of the Villa Doria Pamphili Park, some five miles or so — and effortlessly so; a former aristocrat’s estate, resplendent with a birthday cake mansion, it was one of the more elegant retreats in Rome. I’d run through there daydreaming about the kind of life I’d have if I were to stay there for good, or what a pity it was that my father had never experienced such a day. I enjoyed watching the priests in their meditations and the kind of misted and cool mornings when the park was practically deserted, when you got a sense of how things once used to be.