The ANNOTICO Report

Alexander Bevilacqua is an Italian from Milan studying at Harvard and
obviously well steeped in Italian Literature.

Alexander is curious about the contrast between naive, innocent Americans
and over-cultivated, world-weary Europeans, and how these cultural
differences play out in his own life.

He wonders that however much as New World innocence and Old World
experience are an alluring pairing, he believes that the paradigm must
conceal a more complex and profound truth.

Does he find it?

The Harvard Independent
Harvard's Weekly NewsMagazine
By Alexander Bevilacqua
Thursday, April 21, 2005

... It was the end of spring break and I couldn't wait for this (lay over
in Frankfort on my way to Milan) to be over (although the)... one
consolation was that the proximity to other human beings did allow for
close observation, to me always a worthwhile pursuit.

Opposite sat a young American heiress, or so seemed to declare her hat (an
enormous, broad-brimmed affair, complete with exotic feathers and netting)
as well as her Italian designer jeans, clearly a spring break purchase. Her
nose was stuck in "Weekend in Paris"-a novella I imagined to be a facile
riff on the beloved theme of Americans in Europe.

Since first reading Nabokov and Henry James, I have loved the contrast
between naive, innocent Americans and over-cultivated, world-weary
Europeans. Each time I return home to Milan, Italy, I try to understand in
what way these cultural differences play out in my own life. As much as New
World innocence and Old World experience are an alluring pairing, I firmly
believed that the paradigm must conceal a more complex and profound truth.

As I turned away from my American signorina, I noticed that my own pleasure
reading seemed to offer new insights into how European culture bears on
America. I was reading John Ashbery on Parmigianino: in 1959 Vienna, the
poet from Rochester, NY, is staring at an Italian mannerist work. His
search for the soul is beautiful, but my mind, more apt at engaging with
historical footnotes than at parsing rhetoric, soon wandered. Bard College
was home not just to Ashbery but also to the mythical "I.B.," or Irma
Brandeis, the woman to whom Italian poet Eugenio Montale dedicated his Ossi
di Seppia (Cuttlefish Bones).

I have always wondered about her love affair with the Ligurian poet, who
wrote of her as the sun-loving nymph Clizia. Why did she return to America?
Is a European education just a passing phase of life after all? There is
something fascinating about the young American woman with a college degree
in Italian literature or art history as she is let loose on Europe. It is
her seriousness, coupled with her simple American femininity, that make us
all gaze at her in admiration. Irma Brandeis has been for me the prime
representative of this tradition, yet soon I realized that she had little
to do with Ashbery, who would have been blessing his diapers when Brandeis
first met the Italian poet she would decades later defend passionately in
reader's letters to the New York Review of Books.

No, there is a crucial difference between how well Brandeis's and Ashbery's
generations knew Europe, and I found it summed up by two words in the
latter's poem: le temps, a most disturbing intrusion to my ear. In the
poem, the French expression for weather serves to explain the connection
between time and meteorology, begging the question of why the Italian
equivalent, il tempo, was not used, despite its greater aptitude and
economy, this being a poem about an Italian self-portrait. The poet's
redemptive excuse might be metrical exigencies, but otherwise the lapse had
revealed itself to be the classic reversion to American general culture,
specifically to the high school French class.

How disappointing - often what at first appears to be intercultural
understanding is in fact just such solipsism. In college, I have found it
extremely difficult to express to Americans Italian culture on its own
terms. Always relating it to the American experience, my friends seem to
fail to see that the beauty of so much of our inheritance lies just in its
uselessness and in the threat this lack of practical applications poses to
its survival.

Where Ashbery upsets me, I try to feel vindicated that an earlier American
generation knew Italy quite differently - Brandeis was one of many
Americans to thoroughly love my country. The full list of authors I studied
in four years of high school Italian literature is engraved on the façade
of the Boston Public Library (built 1888), in what seems to me the greatest
triumph of so many authors now unknown outside Italy. This exciting
testament to the presence of Italy in the heart of American high culture
describes a moment which soon passed. The difference by the time of
Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" is a simple historical event:
World War II. Afterwards, culture flowed in the opposite direction, and
here I am, an Italian educated in the United States, a country which seems
to do a better job of education than my own old nation.

Putting down my book, my attention returned to my fellow human beings.
Perhaps the Lufthansa lounge might after all provide greater inspiration in
challenging the classic paradigm of European-American relations. Behind me,
a young man and woman spoke with that light and easy tone that is
characteristic of well-educated American twenty-somethings. The surfeit of
education combined with the excess of leisure makes for relaxed but very
articulate banter, and it was quite disarming to rediscover in the
Frankfurt airport the world to which I returned.

As I eavesdropped, the man, coming from Zurich and Amsterdam, betrayed his
unhappiness about the return. The woman, telling of Alpine hikes and
Italian lakes, concurred. "Europeans are better than Americans, I've
decided." I smiled at the categorical certainty, but then their reasons
caught my attention: "Europeans are so much more friendly, open,
relaxed..." Intriguingly, they had just inverted the traditional image of
Europeans as devious and obscure and Americans as sunny, simple souls.

I tried testing the switch of roles, and discovered that, certainly, one
can identify baroque social norms at American elite colleges, and see
Europeans instead as less circuitous about their complexity-but then I
stopped myself. It would be all too easy to contrast the insincere
friendliness of Americans to the social-democratic honesty of Europeans.
However, this idea is nothing but a very facile comparison often made in
Western Europe which makes me uneasy. To its further disadvantage, it is a
conception without the validation of two centuries of literary reflection.

As we stood in line to board the plane, the American man showed the
American woman pictures of the tulip fields, and I suddenly realized that a
literary trope had been clouding my view of the homogeneity of
Euro-American culture. What matters about the man looking at Parmigianino
in 1959, I thought, is that any talk about cultures in the plural is in
great part convenient coloring.

Novels thrive on it, but emphasizing the contrasts is not terribly useful,
because we really share a web not just of references but even of cultural
ideals. As I sat down in my seat, I put to rest my quest for redefining the
European-American relationship. It was fun but unnecessary. I could finally
relax. While I might like to think of myself as the latest inheritor of a
fascinating cultural divide, I also am just too tired of it all. I will
shelve the attempt to view my life through a literary prism and will just
pick what seems best from each shore of the Atlantic. This must be how Irma
and John lived, and so will I.