My five weeks in Civitella were most enjoyable and productive: I wrote six stories, a piece and a poem; I met lovely and intelligent people from all over the world, and had witty and informal conversations with them, enlarging my experience of art and, perhaps more important, of human soul; and, last but not least, I enjoyed exquisite local cuisine and the care of the staff of this extraordinary institution. All this in the most quiet, magnificent and historical environment one can imagine, combining solitude and social life within short distance of some of the most beautiful Italian towns, cradle of the Renaissance.
…earlier I saw his wife and his son, an ugly woman and a fat child, I think again about that portrait of domestic misery, you are unhappy, I say to him, he looks at me with gratitude, as if I had offered him an alternative, once, I say to him, a judge told me that his wife forbade him to play the piano and this made him suffer a great deal, then he’d given up, many men give up, everyone has his own kind of unhappiness, yes he says, but I dream of my mother, my mother has been dead three years, but I keep dreaming that she is not dead, that she comes to my house, that I find her hiding behind the bathroom door or in the storage closet, dressed in black, she looks at me shrewdly, then I sense what she’s about to tell me, now she’s telling me what I have to do, you have to throw out that woman, she says, that woman is my wife, mother, I say to her, that woman is Franca, my wife, and she laughs…