Italy: face to face with their muse
It was love at first sight. Henry James was 26 when he crossed the border from Switzerland and made his way, on foot, down into Italy — “warm and living and palpable,” he wrote to his sister on August 31, 1869. The romance kindled that day lasted nearly 40 years, and played a signi”cant part in his career; he set some of his greatest works in Italy, including Daisy Miller, The Aspern Papers, and The Wings of the Dove. Writers from Dante to D. H. Lawrence, Hemingway to Hesse, have found their muse in Italy.
This year, 19 students from my AP Literature class followed this well-worn path and took their learning outside the walls of SAS. They boarded a plane and %ew to Italy to meet their muse face to face, to see just what “beauty” could elicit from them individually and collectively. In the Mediterranean we were able to experience the wonders that created some of the world’s greatest art and literature. For it was here that Homer. Finally, found a rival in Virgil, here that Augustine and Aquinas taught, and here that Dante discovered the “sweet new style” that would sweep across Europe and resonate with the great Romantic poets Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley. It was here that John Keats, barely 26, drew his last breath, and Ezra Pound, no longer writing or speaking, was laid to rest. We would reflect deeply on the days in our post-dinner seminars, and maybe dream that we would write an Iliad for our times.
The first stop on the journey was Milan, home to fashion icons Armani and Ambrose, as well as Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” A city that has been inhabited for 2,500 years, Milan is unique in its capacity to create fashions that synthesize its history with haute couture modernity. We arrived in Milan on March 29, checked into our hotel room and immediately set out on foot to the city center. It was rounding the corner of Manzini that you could hear the students gasp, as one of the greatest cathedrals in the world, the Duomo di Milano, stood in stark relief to the deep blue late afternoon sky. The following day we walked across town to the Santa Maria della Grazie and took in da Vinci’s “!e Last Supper.” We later found a local trattoria, sampled Milanese food, and talked about what we had seen and what we hoped for in the days to come.
One of the highlights of the trip was our second day in Florence, when our guide took us to the Galleria dell’Accademia, and walked us down a short hall, instructing everyone not to look to the right. When we were all gathered, she said, “Nowyou can look.” And there, 30 meters away, was the “David.” People don’t talk much in its presence, which is the closest thing to the divine that most of us experience on earth. The hush was a lesson in the power of beauty, and how words can fail us. We were so engaged, walking slowly around it, taking it in, that finally the guide (wiser than most) simply said, “You know … let’s just end the tour here and you guys stay as long as you like.” Katie Wu was drawing furiously on one side of her sketchbook while Jun Park was sketching on the other side. Lily Luo and Ti$any Wang were unable to take their eyes o$ the sculpture. Eyes glistened with tears as we milled slowly around. And as we explored it further, we found that Florence was to have this e$ect on us for the following three days and two nights.
The Santa Croce church, last resting place for Michelangelo and Machiavelli, and the Santa Trinita Gelateria were favorites for some. For others it was the climb up the inner shell of the Brunelleschi’s great dome to the top of the church that looks out over the red-tiled city. For Jocelyn Shih, it was the Ponte Vecchio in its happy radiance. The students also visited the U#zi and were allowed to stay as long as they liked without a guide shepherding them through. !e point, of course, was not to become art critics who can tell you all about perspective, sfumato, or contrapposto, but to let the art speak to them as objects of beauty, not historical artifacts.
The city was theirs to walk and talk and reflect and write. The Tuscan city of Volterra, our next stop, dates back to 9,000 BC and the Stone Age. Perched on a high mountain with green valleys strewn in all directions, the current walled city is an Etruscan settlement that goes back to 700 BC. Here we stayed in the same hotel that D. H. Lawrence stayed in a century ago, writing his “rst draft of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It was there, with the home style cooking of the Hotel Nazionale, that we had our most interesting seminars. For many on the trip, this was the best part. We had no program, no guides, and no meetings except at the end of the day. !e only instructions were to explore the small walled town, discover a new place to have pizza, or prosciutto, or pistachio cheese. Find an empty church and sit for 30 minutes taking in the smell of the incense and stone, gazing at the old paintings in their proper setting. Some found a park to sketch or paint in, others found a stone bench, or the old Roman theater uncovered less than 50 years ago. At night we gathered to share our experiences and reflect on what it meant.
Having read parts of the Bible, plus Homer and Plato, earlier in the AP Literature course, the students were able to make connections to what they saw and how they articulated their experiences. As a teacher of literature, what was most satisfying was to hear how many said the experience had changed their lives, how it made them want more beauty around them, and how they wanted their lives shaped by the idea of the beautiful.
