“Write me a Prologue,” Bottom instructs his fellow players inA Midsummer’s Night Dreamto center the audience’s attention on what was coming. And so, by way of prologue, let me establish how I connected to Italy and why I set about to probe its legendary appeal to other women who came, saw, and were conquered.

For me, as a girl in upstate New York, there was always the notion of the “otherness” of Italy. My imagination was easily and early fed through a favorite book,A Child’s History of the World, with its accounts of ancient Rome and classical...

On a glorious, clear, cool, and sun-lit October afternoon, I was present at the outdoor dedication of the Newington-Cropsey Foundation Gallery of Art in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. The gallery was conceived and built by Barbara Newington to honor her great-grandfather Jasper Cropsey, an eminent nineteenth-century artist of the Hudson River School. Fronted by a duck pond and set in a hollow east of the river and below the slope where Cropsey’s home, Ever Rest, is visible, the edifice rises like a version of the Taj Mahal or Alhambra, something exotic in any case for a small river town. Within is...

A few years before my stay at the American Academy in Rome, I had been a fellow resident at Villa Serbelloni, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center on Lake Como in northern Italy. Situated above one of earth’s beauty spots, the villa is sited on a wooded promontory overlooking the lake with its distant ring of Alps. The beauty of Lake Como was well known in antiquity to the Romans who, by the first century A.D., had established their villas in magnificent locations along the lake. According to scholars, Pliny the Younger’s written description of his property indicates...

On a sunny February day when I stood in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome at the 150th memorial service for John Keats, who was buried there in 1821, it was just a month since my husband had died suddenly in Rome and I was remembering him, poet, too. After the service for Keats, I wandered a bit in that lovely and haunting spot, once a scorned waste area located at the edges of the city overlooked by the ancient Pyramid of Gaius Cestius and designated for the burial of non-Catholics. By the nineteenth century, it was a walled and flowering...

Mabel Dodge, acquiring the attire and attitude of a Renaissance personage, was the willful mistress of Villa Curonia in Arcetri outside Florence from 1905 to 1912. Among her string of names—she was born Ganson, then acquired Evans, Dodge, Sterne, and Luhan through marriages—Reticence was not one. One biographer entitled her work simplyMabel, putting her in the category of those greats known by first names only—Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, kings, queens, and saints.

Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1879, Mabel was a preeminent American exemplar of the genus Mistress of the Grand Salon and Patroness of All....

I was a young, aspiring writer when the excitement of an international literary review from Rome calledBotteghe Oscurearrived in upstate New York and flung open the doors to the wider world of writing and pointed my way to Italy where it was happening. It was just after World War II ended: the era of Dior’s new look, of the debate on Ezra Pound the poet versus Pound the traitor, and of the end of American isolationism. At my university the English department was agog over the new review. Bland-beige of cover and fat in format,Botteghe Oscurewas...

Picture a 1458 Tuscan villa fronted by a terrace mossy with age and looking down from Fiesole’s heights to Florence below, a city cradled between hills in the valley of the Arno river that flows through it. Built on foundations dating even earlier, when it was a stronghold, Villa Medici had been transformed by the great Florentine architect Michelozzo for Cosimo de’Medici into a “place for leisure pursuits.”¹ It was thereafter most associated with Cosimo’s grandson Lorenzo, known as Il Magnifico for the grandeur with which he illumined Florence. From the villa Lorenzo would ride off for the hunt in...

On the night before I was to fly to Rome my sleep was uneasy. The trip was to visit my daughter Susi and her family and to take in some of the sites associated with the women about whom I was writing. It was years since I had lived in Rome and I dreamt I had to get a train and couldn’t find Stazione Termini. This seemed significant: would I have the same feelings that I had voiced inUmbria, a long-ago poetry collection in which I recorded my first revelation of Italy? Would I recover old bearings and find...