Rassegna storica del Risorgimento

REMEMBERING GHISA
In the late afternoon of July 15 1925 I left my room in the apartment of the vedova Balducci and groped my way through the labyrìnth of streets (as it seemed to me at the time) between Via Parione and the Palazzo Salviati on the Corso, where the first session of the corsi estivi per stranieri {Le. americani) sponsored by the America-Italy society was scheduled. Such summer courses are common enough nowadays; many cities in Italy and throughout the continent offer such educational enticements to student-tourists, but in 1925 they were stili a novelty. I think in fact that 1925 was the first year of the Roman experiment; organizationally there was something rather tenta tive about it. My class that year included less than a dozen students, a heterogeneous group made up of representatives of faJ various ages, sexes and levels of academic preparation. I found them congenial enough but with most of them I had little in common. Over the years I can recali only three: an amiable middle-aged professor from the University of Syracuse, already familiar with Italy and its language but eager to improve his conversational fluency, a venerable grande dame named Merrill who had long memories of the city (she had been a little girl there when the Piemontesi forced their way through the Porta Pia), and Herbert Matthews, destined to become a journalist of international renown and at that time attached to the Rome bureau of the New York Times. But if the scolaresca was a little non descript the faculty was superb. Our principal mentors were Giuseppe Tucci, already a well known scholar who gave us lectures on Italian literature (though his specialty was taoismo), Bruno Migliorini, later to become very distinguished indeed for his work in linguistics (he led us or attempted to lead us through the subtleties of the Italian language), and A. M. Ghisalberti, who had the doublé assign-ment of lecturing to us on Italian history and culture and serving as our guide for the countless tours we made about the city and in its environs. Tucci and Migliorini we saw only in the classroom but Ghisa was with us many hours of the day (and even some nights, for we made nocturnal sorties to the Coliseum and the Via Appia). Under his expert and bene-volent guidance we visited ali the monuments, churches, galleries, fountains and notable sites that could be crammed into those brief weeks.
On first sight I found Ghisa not only impressive but simpatico. To my inexperìenced eye (I had never been to Italy before, and the Italian-Americans I had known at home were of Southern stock) Ghisa didn't look Italian. His complexion was not swarthy but rather pale, he was very tali, and in style and comportment he did not seem Latin at ali, I thought in fact that he looked a little lìke President Wilson. What's more he never drank wine or spirita. Except for a notable vivacity of speech he might have been an Anglo-Saxon. Or so it seemed to me in my innocence. (In which connec­tion I remember Ghisa in his opening lecture telling us that Italians were