Wendy on the patio, Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Lake Como, November 1992 - On a day of "mists and mellow fruitfulness"
Lake Como in the Italian lake district is the most beautiful
of the lakes in that region, a Y-shaped lake with the small city of Como at the
western end, St Moritz in Switzerland above the mountains at the eastern end, Lecco
to the south, and the town of Bellagio in the apex of the “Y,” where there are
views of all three arms of the Lake. It is a setting of great beauty but little
if any strategic importance. There has been a settlement there since very
ancient times, always sought out and usually occupied by the rich and powerful.
At the height of the Roman Empire, Pliny the younger, a scholar who had strong
aesthetic sensibilities, built a villa here and his statue remains in the
grounds of the Villa Serbelloni to this day. After the end of the Roman supremacy,
the site was occupied by a succession of powerful families including the Sforza
dynasty until it passed into the possession of the minor but wealthy Serbelloni
family, who sold it to a Swiss hotelier who in turn sold it to Ella Walker of
the American liquor family of Hiram Walker. She married into the Italian
aristocracy and became a principessa (princess) so during the lifetime of her
husband the property was again in the possession of the Italian nobility. She
was childless. At her death which was many years after her husband’s, she
bequeathed the Villa Serbelloni and its lands to the Rockefeller Foundation, and
it was made it into a prestigious international study and conference
centre.
I have had three visits to the Villa Serbelloni, two to
conferences and the third time, as a scholar in residence. The first conference
I attended was in September 1982, to join one of the working groups preparing
the 10th revision of the International Classification of Diseases. I was back at the Villa Serbelloni for
another conference in May 1985, where the theme was the future of health and
health care services. My third visit to the Villa was as a scholar in residence,
where I planned and wrote the first draft of a monograph on ethical problems
that can arise in epidemiological practice and research. (Parts of this have
subsequently been published as chapters in books and as free-standing papers in
peer-reviewed journals but the book was never published in its entirety).
The main building of the Villa Serbelloni occupies a level
clearing close to the heights in the extensive grounds, which descend to the
lake shore on the south (Lecco arm) of Lake Como and east. It is a 17th
Century palace that was completely renovated when the Rockefeller Foundation
assumed ownership. It has several commodious rooms and suites – library, dining
and sitting rooms, a music room, others upstairs set up for conferences, and a
few spacious bed sitting rooms for guests. The out-buildings include a 17th
century tower with a large bedroom on each of its three floors, and next to it,
the Sfondrata, a longer, lower building with more rooms for guests. About half
way up the hill to the Villa, another building, the 17th century
Maranese, contains studio suites for scholars in residence and conference
guests. On my first visit I had the room at the top of the tower, and was
lulled to sleep each night by the gentle lapping of water against the base of
the tower and awoke each morning to the same lovely water music. It was a
splendid place to be for a week, although low water pressure made the shower
function poorly, or not at all if anyone on one of the lower floors turned on a
tap. I was rapporteur for the
conference, which meant that at the end of each session I had to write up the
proceedings. Then at the end of the
afternoon session, I had to dash down the hill to the tower, have another
shower and dress formally for dinner, missing most of the aperativi and
preprandial conversation. On my second
visit, my room was in the Maranese, and although Wendy was not allowed to stay
at the Villa Serbelloni with me, she stayed in a small hotel in Bellagio so we
could enjoy this extraordinarily beautiful part of the world together during my
time off, and she was allowed to dine once or twice as my guest.
When I returned as a scholar in residence accompanied by
Wendy in November 1992, we had just come from a final visit to my dying father
in Malta and throughout our stay each international phone call for me (for some
reason there were many) induced a premonition that he had died. As it turned
out, he survived until New Year’s Day, two weeks after we got home to Ottawa.
We began our brief period in residence in the Maranese but were uncomfortable
there, especially walking to and from meals on frosty mornings and cold dark evenings,
so we moved to a studio suite in the main Villa after a few days when a room
became available. Our windows gave us a superb view of the western arm of Lake
Como with the steep mountains on the Swiss side to the right and the hills of
northern Italy to the left, the blue waters of Lake Como in the middle. There are several smaller out-buildings on the
high ground above the Villa, including two set up for artists and composers,
equipped with a grand piano. Wendy spent
some time in one of these suites composing a piece of music during our stay,
and occasionally used the other to touch up the pictures she was painting of
the spectacular scenery. She was
experimenting with oil pastels and produced a dozen or so vivid sketch
paintings of the Villa, its grounds, and views across the lake to each shore in
the distance.. When we got home I had several of her pictures framed and I have
three of them on the wall of my home office as a permanent reminder of that
lovely place and an all-too-brief interlude in our lives.
It is the policy of the Rockefeller Foundation to mix
scholars in residence from diverse disciplines, the humanities, creative arts,
natural and biological sciences, philosophy and so forth. Those with whom Wendy
and I shared our time at the Villa were probably a rather typical mixture. They
were all interesting people – some unforgettable. One was the writer Jonathan
Franzen, a youthful novelist of great promise. His prize-winning novel The Corrections, may have been born
there although he was ostensibly working on a different book. Another was the
historian of colonial America, Bill Chafe.
The book on which he was working (political chicanery in early 19th
century USA) came out a year or so later to receive high praise and several
awards. The (adopted) Australian visual artist Merilyn Fairskye, at the time
resident in New York, was a rather beautiful young woman, perhaps of Armenian
heritage I think. She and a youngish Brazilian philosopher had a brief but
quite torrid romantic liaison. There
were several others – a composer and his wife, another musician, from the
University of Indiana at Bloomington, Indiana, two poets, a husband-wife
combination from Oregon; two urban sociologists, one from Stanford, the other
from NYU, who were jointly writing a monograph on alienated youth in the
counter-culture; and a woman with
middle-eastern roots who had a rich knowledge of Farsi (Iranian) literature and
culture (but rather repulsive table manners – she had a partial set of dentures
that she removed and put on the table beside her to eat parts of her
meals). In the evenings we all came
together for general conversations about life, the universe and everything. It was among the most mind-expanding and
memorable experiences I’ve ever had, and it inspired Wendy to compose a piece
of music and to paint some excellent little pictures.
Although the days were short by that time of the year, the
weather was fine and sunny almost all the time we were there, cool but not cold
nights, warm but not hot sunny days. I
worked moderately hard but allowed enough time off for a couple of cruises on
Lake Como, once into Como itself, the other to the nearby lakeside towns of
Mennagio and Varenna. The alpine region
of Northern Italy is very beautiful, this part perhaps the most beautiful of
all. Ideally, I think we would both have preferred to be there entirely on
holiday but my conscience would not allow me to do this, so I had to leave much
of the sight-seeing and exploring to Wendy while I sat at my desk gazing at the
beautiful view out the window, thinking beautiful thoughts and attempting to
capture them in bad prose on floppy disks. There was abundant time, however,
for leisurely walks on the paths through the grounds of the Villa Serbelloni,
where the late autumn fruits, notably bright red persimmons and a few plums,
were ripe for the plucking. We strolled
down to the lake shore beside the tower where I had stayed on my first visit,
around the paths higher up on the east side towards the Swiss mountains, and
down on the other side towards and into the village of Bellagio. Some days
after lunch we sunned ourselves on a patio outside the dinning room. I have a fine photograph of a group of us
relaxing there one sunny day, with the Swiss mountains glistening in
fresh-fallen snow as a back-drop.
South facade of Villa Serbelloni and approach drive to front entrance on opposite side of Villa
Alas, too soon it was all over. We came back into the town
of Como in the Villa’s limousine, caught the train to Lugano through the
spectacular network of tunnels through the St Bernard Pass, and on to Zurich,
whence we flew home to Ottawa barely ten days before Christmas of 1992.
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