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Pushing open the wrought-iron gate, I crossed into the small courtyard that led to the apartment entrance. In my hand, I held a bag of pastries, big-nole in the local parlance, clumsily selected from a bakery down the block. The store's window was stuffed with unfamiliar, barely identifiable items — Were they sweet or savory? Hard or soft? Did they hold chocolate or fruit or some secret ingredient more redolent of the butcher than the baker? The exotic foodstuffs — exotic to me, that is — were a reminder that I was in a foreign city or, more accurately, that I was a foreigner, still subject to surprise and uncertainty, despite the reassuring semblances of modern life.
Doubts about my journey to Milan also peeked back into view. I was about to conduct what I conceived of as the first in a series of conversations with psychoanalysts whose work and life had particularly intersected with politics and history. Fair enough. Yet, it was hard to shake a feeling that it was a combination of willful naïveté and pathological hubris that had led me now a few steps shy of knocking on the door of the renowned Italian psychoanalyst, Luciana Nissim Momigliano. The project was now to be put to the test, having crossed the Atlantic to a city I had never seen, to converse with someone I had never met, with shamefully few bits of Italian in hand beyond hello, goodbye, may I please have the check, and thank you very molto grazie. To complicate matters further, Dr. Nissim had been seriously ill, the meeting almost cancelled, and now I was to be trespassing on her recuperation.
It was too late to turn back. Time had been placed aside for the afternoon. Dr. Andreina Robutti, of the Milan Psychoanalytic Institute, was drafted into the scheme to serve as translator. I worried further that Dr. Nissim had made room for the meeting out of her own regret at having cancelled a presentation in the U.S. that I had previously arranged. (Her gracious note at the time spoke of her doctor's forbidding he