I carried the banner up in my suitcase, telling the guards it was photographic equipment; two women climbed to the top of the Tower with the banner’s ropes wrapped around them, underneath their raincoats. We stationed people on each level of the tower to keep the banner straight.

When we let the ropes down, a guard walked over to ask what was going on. One of our guys said to him in Italian: “We’re measuring the Tower.” The guard said, “Carry on!” Since the Tower is the bell tower of the Cathedral of Pisa, we had cleared our actions in advance with church authorities. They seemed mildly amused by the whole escapade.

Just as the banner was unfurled, a busload of tourists from California arrived and madly snapped pictures. Ken Veronda, ’62, took our official picture. It ran on the front page of the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.

A Palo Alto Times editorial called for us to be dismissed from school, but a letter to the editor from Professor Crosten—who was present for the event, since he was leading us on the field trip to Pisa—supported our efforts, and the incident was closed. Thus a small group of students supported their team and achieved a fleeting moment of fame, more than 40 years ago.

I remember a long delay between flights, many of us strewn about on the chairs and the floor of the TWA terminal. Finally our plane took off, landing in Paris around dawn. After a short flight to Milan, we boarded our bus for Florence under a light snowfall. We were anxious to arrive at Villa San Paolo, and to see the city where we would be living for six months, but we first had to stop at a futuristic, worst-of-American style Autogrill, built on a bridge over the Autostrada. Cindy and I had been warned that, as the boys' alternate list had been depleted when we were chosen, we would be living on the boys' floor. Next door to us was Padre Rienzi, who managed the Villa, and whose bathroom we would be sharing (with luxurious bathtub). At around 8 p.m. every evening Padre Rienzi would close the heavy, green drapes between our room and the rest of the corridor, to protect us from our male neighbors. We used to hear him counting money at night, perhaps the profits from wine, milk, and other extras bought by the students at mealtime. A humorless man.

Our room had a view (far off) of the Duomo, and (closer in) of the other wing of the Villa. In fact, we had an excellent view of Gordy Nelson's room across the way. Very early on we became friends with our maids, Silvana and Corallina. They furnished us with the latest gossip about Padre Rienzi and other staff members, and also helped us a great deal with learning slang expressions in Italian. The room had very high ceilings, almost higher than its width or length, and the storage possibilities were quite limited. We each had a desk with one small drawer, and there was a wardrobe with one drawer each for our clothes. Cindy had brought a portable record player, quite astonishing! And I supplied water pistols, which came in handy when we had water strikes.

In those years, there was a between-quarter break trip to the USSR, jointly arranged somehow between Stanford in Vienna and Stanford in Italy. Vienna required three quarters of German, and Florence required only two of Italian—easy math, in 1969. Besides, Vladimir Nabokov (another intoxication of those years) had written that the only two languages which can be spoken with a broad smile are Russian and Italian.

Florence I recall as a haze of Tuscan heat and adolescent hormones and the particular lunacy—purple haze, perhaps—that had settled over the US, and the world, in those years. The trip to Russia, however, shines as luminescent in my memory as the pearly White Night skies over what then was still Leningrad. Russia in 1969 might well have been on another planet, and I reveled in it as I might, had I truly had the chance to travel to other solar systems.

The six months over, I returned to Stanford and flung myself into Russian—which also brought me early up against the future, in the form of computer-taught language, then being pioneered by Joe Van Campen. I cut virtually all ties to Italy, save one—a course in medieval Italian poetry taught by Professore Leone, which I took as a hedge against a possible application to graduate school in Comparative Literature, should I not be able to build up sufficient chops for an application for further training in Russian. I remember little from that course, in part because I took notes in Italian (the language in which il Professore taught), and by quarter's end my mastery had slipped so badly I could no longer understand my own notes. Still, to this day I recall the opening quatrain of Cecco Angiolieri's “ S'i' fosse fuoco arderei'l mondo”—“If I were fire, I would inflame the world”—good strong stuff for the 13th century, eh?

Time went on, all of it in Russian. Grad school, research in Moscow (dark, cold, and eminently mysterious in long-ago 1974-75), more trips with student groups, teaching, research, translations, articles, novels, marriage, children, glasnost, perestroika... ...

And then, in 1988, there came an odd, but marvelous coda to my long-ago vita Italiana. Perestroika had made it possible for my wife and me and three children (one of them but a few months old) to be invited to Moscow, she to teach about the “Soviet nationality problem,” and me to co-author the first ever “Soviet-American thriller.”

Possible to be invited...but not to receive visas. We had arranged leave from the university where we labored, and had rented our house to a group of students who had agreed to take care of our dog, and the students had even moved in . . . and still no visas. After a month of living nine in a house (plus dog), we realized something had to be done, and so we decided to take advantage of the offer, long ago and lightly given by a neighbor, to “visit my beach house in Sicily sometime.”

Thus it was that we came, the five of us, to spend three months in a fishing village about 60 kilometers west of Palermo, in a house about 60 yards from the Mediterranean. Our only expense was a rented car, in which we toured the entire island (passing up only the asphalt lake of Ragusa, for reasons I think not hard to understand), and food, for which we walked each day into the village, with our six-month old in a carrier on my back. It will be no surprise, I imagine, that taking a baby to Sicily proved to be the greatest gig discovered—just the act of buying bread required at least an hour, such a fuss did all the workers in each bakery make.

As if to prove that life has patterns that we can not perceive, the village was quite close to the resort of Citta del Mare, owned by the Italian Communist Party, where—it has been reported—a young Russian official named Mikhail Gorbachev happened to visit in the early 1980s, there to encounter the Italian Party head Achille Occhetto, who (it is said) convinced Gorbachev that communism had to change its ways. Remembering the glories of the sun setting over the littoral of San Vito lo Capo, which Citta del Mare would face, makes it easy for me to believe that Gorbachev could understand vividly that there was more to life than standing on Lenin's Tomb twice a year (sadly, when, in another twist of fate, my wife and I had the chance yet another decade further on to host Gorbachev at our university, I forgot to reminisce with him about the Golfo de Castellamare).

The real moment of glory, however, came one day as we were leaving Siracusa (visited because we had been living near its namesake, Syracuse NY, for several eons), and I had a head-on collision. Very Sicilian—both of us in the wrong, but I less so than the one who struck us, with much traipsing to a near-by bar to phone Italy's various police (none of whom had the slightest interest once it was established there were no dead), and the colorful addition of an uncle who appeared from nowhere, to insist that he was a lawyer and “ Signore ha tort.” Having spent a lot of time around the Stanford Law School, I was not going to let anyone pin the “tort” for this on me.

And so we argued, in grand operatic floridity . . . three hours under the Sicilian sun, with Mt Etna smoking indifferently in the background, my opponent looking more and more like John Travolta before he gained all that weight. In the end, I won. As evening purpled, my would-be tort-shake-down acquaintance finally stuck out his hand, apologized for having struck our car, and then ended with the words I never once heard in Florence.

“You speak Italian well, Signore....”
A compliment I would never have been paid, had I not wanted two decades earlier to go to Russia, and thus ended up in Stanford in Italy.

I loved being overseas. I had tons of fun, made new friends, became somewhat fluent, saw much of Europe, was as adventurous as I would ever be, and gained much confidence.

My recent memory is the following. Our daughter is a junior at Stanford. When she decided to go to Stanford, we made her promise that she would spend some time at an overseas campus since she was going to college so close to home. She made good on her promise and just returned from spending fall term in Florence. My husband and I were in Florence in July without our daughter, and we checked out the Stanford campus since it was no longer at Villa Il Salviatino, where we had been. We were happily surprised to see Anna, who was in her first year of working at Stanford when I was there in '74 and is still working at the Florence campus. I went back again in late October to visit our daughter because she had a very long holiday weekend. We had a fabulous time eating well, walking all over Florence, and visiting Rome. It was very special to see her be a student in nearly the same circumstances I had experienced 33 years earlier.

Maria Grazia arranged for a piano in the basement. I remember being serious in my study of the language and music. European music instructors were much more serious than I had been used to - and I remember when it came to grading - the head of the program had to explain the A/B/C system to the maestro - and he was not entirely convinced I was deserving of a higher grade! Later in life, I went on to pursue a career in business - but wound up returning to live and work in Italy for 5 years (in Tortona/Piedmont and Milano) - working for American companies as their overseas Controller. The Italian language for me - has turned out to be a very practical asset to have in terms of my career. However, my love of Italy is very deep. It is hard for people to understand when I explain that living and working there for over 5 years - I cannot remember a single day when anything "bad" ever happened. Something about the combination of wonderful food, charming people - art, history, the sun - I am not sure exactly - make Italy a very special place.

I received a world-class education at Stanford, and I may have forgotten much of the calculus, physics, and economic theory, but I will never forget seeing the Duomo or David for the first time or how to enjoy a simple bowl of pasta and a delicious bottle of Chianti with friends, and lingering over biscotti, gelato and grappa. Those lessons will be repeated for the rest of my life, and I am better for it!

Some of my favorite memories include:

• Freezing to death on our winter trip to Modena. Our lunch included strawberries and vanilla ice cream drizzled with 30-plus-year-old aged vinegar. Somehow that wasn't enough food for me... . The staff had to take me to a restaurant. They fed me the largest meal of my life!
• The Bella Ciao Girls: Adryon, Andrea, Margia and I formed a Bella Ciao group of travelers. We traveled every weekend to places like the Isola d'Elba and Puglia.
• Our Bing trip to Sicily in the spring—we started a new tradition for Stanford in Florence.
• Dying of heat in our summer apartment and trying to take a shower to cool off. It would take the water about 10 minutes to get cold because the pipes were exposed on the outside of the apartment so the water in them was practically boiling every day!
• Nights on the bridge supports drinking wine and chilling with our language partners.
• Accidentally stumbling on a pace (peace) march the day war was declared in Iraq in March 2003.