Anecdotes

My husband and I were in Tivoli, and we went to the gardens at Villa d’Este. He’d been to Italy before, but it was my first trip. There were rails in front of the fountains because the water was so polluted, they wanted to keep you from being splashed.’

‘I went to Italy when they were almost giving shoes away – shoes made of leather as soft as gloves – and there were no tours being given of the Forum. I don’t think there was one Japanese tourist in all of Rome. Maybe my trip was before cameras were invented.’

Lucia and I were playing the Italy-One-Upmanship game in the back seat of a Carey car. I knew I was going to be the one to pay the fare. I was doing my friend Christine a favour. Lucia, her mother, had come in from Princeton on the train to hear Christine’s talk at Columbia about Margaret Bourke-White. Christine would also be showing slides of newly discovered photographs, printed from Bourke-White negatives that had been mislabelled at Life. She was hoping to be hired full-time at Columbia and this was one of several talks she would be giving there and elsewhere, aiming to impress.