It is 8:45 A.M. at Malpenza Airport near Milano. Barbara Fisher and I collect our luggage from the overnight flight and pass through customs. Greeting us in the lobby is a pleasant man in a dark suit and tie, holding a sign: Bellagio/Dr. Ross. He takes our bags from us, loads them into an air-conditioned Mercedes and, after a one-and-a-half-hour drive through the Lombardy countryside, deposits us at the Bellagio Center.
Cianna Celli, assistant director, greets us and takes us to our suite. In the bedroom, behind a wrought iron queen-size bed, hangs a tapestry of vines and flowers. In the study are twin desks, computers, and modern Tizio lamps. It is here that we will spend six hours daily, working on our books.
From every room, including the ultramodern bath, is a view of Lago Lecco and the terraced mountainsides beside and beyond it. The staff will change our beds daily, turning the sheets down at night, and our towels twice a day. There are bud vases about the rooms, with roses clipped from the garden and sprigs of rosemary, which for some reason is not used by the kitchen.
Another hour, and we are on the terrace near the villa chatting with Skip Gates and other participants from the Dubois Centers Afro-American Studies Conference. At one o'clock, residents and conferees are ushered through the villa's marble corridors, past Ming vases, sixteenth-century tapestries, and paintings, into separate dining areas. We have lunch on the canopied terrace overlooking the lakes.
There the pasta cycle, lasting the five weeks of a resident's stay, begins: linguine with leeks in the May Italian sun. Bees buzz in the lavender and calla lilies in the garden below. A black kite, rather like the one that visited Leonardo's cradle, soars above us searching the smooth surface of the water below for its meal. Pasquale Pesce, the director, welcomes Barbara and me and two other new residents. He invites me to play tennis with him in the shaded court in the woods above, near the fourteenth-century castle that crowns the villas mountain.
The guests sip their cold white wine, served by attentive waiters in white coats. One of them, Perri, touches us gently on the shoulder as he pours. The effect is a mixture of unaffected elegance and mother love away from home. The residents laugh and chat, telling us newcomers about the late afternoon bocce game near the lake below. We learn of the full moon we can expect that night, with little bats circling through the night air, when we will drink after-dinner cordials at the tables on the lawn.
We will not only talk, drink, and laugh as our five weeks of paradise proceed, but will also work
on projects we have come here to complete. In addition to this work, punctuated by lunch and dinner, we will exchange ideas and experiences. We are told to savor every moment, because our stay will end all too soon, and no one can reapply until a decade has passed. At the end, each departing guest will be “roasted” by fellow residents, most of whom try to outdo one another with farewell limericks. We will say good-bye to a landscape belonging, one would have thought, in the background of a Renaissance portrait.
The Rockefeller Foundations Bellagio Study and Conference Center is located at the Villa Serbelloni, a seventeenth-century structure high on a promontory overlooking Lagos Lecco and Como in northern Italy. Donated to the foundation in 1959 by the legendary “Principessa,” granddaughter of the distiller Hiram Walker, the villa requires a staff of thirty-five to maintain. At any one time, fourteen scholars and artists, together with their spouses (some of whom also have grants) are in residence, housed either in the grand yellow villa itself or in the Marinese, an eighteenth-century house also on the grounds. Grant recipients arrive and depart every week, each staying approximately a month. Exquisitely appointed rooms and studies, some of them gazebos or small chapels in the woods or terraced gardens, are provided for the residents' use, along with individual computers and fax and copying facilities. Three times a month, residents are joined for drinks and dinner by twenty or so participants from a variety of four-day conferences on subjects as diverse as Afro-American studies, real wages and migration, and book preservation. (Special working groups lasting one to three weeks are planned for the future.) Otherwise, the twenty or so guests have the villa and its grounds to themselves, where their every need is met graciously and unobtrusively.
I am not the first psychoanalyst to have resided in this earthly paradise. Others have preceded me including, in recent years, Bob and Judy Wallerstein, Howard Shevrin, and Bennett Simon. Nor was I the last. Shortly after my departure, Mardi Horowitz arrived to work on his study of mourning. However, what is striking in the profiles of the residents is the diversity of disciplines and cultures represented. Transported to Eden, we have the opportunity to transcend the limits of our own field of study.
My fellow residents included Frank Parker, a voting rights activist and writer; Joel Handler, an American law professor; and Zeke Hasenfeld, a professor of social work at UCLA. The last two were collaborating on a book on the failure of the work incentive program. Tony Judt, Dean of Humanities at NYU, was beginning a volume on Europe, 1945–1989, for the Oxford History Series. Rachel Jackoff, professor of Italian literature at Wellesley, was writing a book on Dante's imagery. A Pulitzer-winning composer, Ellen Zwillich, was completing a French horn concerto. The chair of Nehru University in New Delhi, Meenakshi Mukherjee, was compiling a volume of nineteenth-century Indian women's diaries and autobiographies. Georges Amar, chief research engineer for the Paris Metro, was there to prepare a book on transportation in the twentieth century. Social psychologist Ajit Kumar Dalai was writing up his research on faith healing in India. A pulmonologist and a comparative literature chair from Toronto, husband and wife Mike and Linda Hutcheon, were beginning a book entitled Desire, Death, and Disease in the Opera. Cornelius Eady, an African-American poet, was working on a volume of prose poems on the death of his father. Dick Whelan was doing a biography of Stieglitz, who had taken some of his first photographs in Bellagio. Guadalupe Rivera Marin, the daughter of Diego Rivera, was working on a metafictional/historical novel about her famous father and his friend Leon Trotsky. Jim Herbert, a painter and filmmaker from Athens, Georgia, did a painterly film of nude figures on the Serbelloni grounds. A biographer of Marie Curie, Susan Quinn, was also in residence, accompanied by her analyst husband, Daniel Jacobs, who was putting together a book on supervision. As for us, I completed a revision of my collected papers on men for Harvard University Press, while Barbara worked on a novel.
The Bellagio Center is open eleven months a year, with four major sessions (February-March, April-June, July-September, October-December). Acceptance is determined on a competitive basis by a panel of reviewers. A brochure and application form may be obtained from the Bellagio Study and Conference Center, the Rockefeller Foundation, 1133 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10036 (212–852–8431).