By: Joseph A. Marquette III, Lecturer, Department of Classics, Humanities and Italian Studies, University of New Hampshire; Doctoral Candidate in Comparative Literature, Université de Montréal

There are gifts that bring a restitutive expansiveness to the life of the mind, and the Renata Poggioli Award is one of them. My grant proposal set out two intentions: to visit sites in Italy that had eluded previous itineraries, and to seek places that would nourish my doctoral work in Comparative Literature, where Ovid, Augustine, Dante, and Bonaventure are constant interlocutors.

The first leg centered on Latium. Rome offered the surprising anachronistic architectural dissonance of the Ara Pacis and the deep interiority of the Boxer at Rest at the Palazzo Massimo. A visit to the Accademia Vivarium Novum at Villa Falconieri in Frascati was a bracing reminder of what humanistic education can look like when Latin and Ancient Greek are treated as living languages: an extraordinary oasis of classical immersion and a genuine resurgence of the Renaissance pedagogical spirit. Tivoli exceeded every expectation: the Villa d’Este’s allegorical fresco cycles, the extraordinary scale of the Villa Adriana, and the Villa Gregoriana’s Dantean descent into the gorge of the Aniene. Bagnoregio delivered everything promised: the medieval streets where Bonaventure was born, the geological drama of the surrounding cliffs, and the luminous plateau of Civita. Tarquinia added painted tombs vivid in ochre and terracotta. Orvieto offered Signorelli’s great fresco cycle in the Cappella di San Brizio, where Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Horace, and Dante are enshrined together as diachronic friends of beautiful letters and the Etruscan caves, with a deep well whose darkness had something of the Mines of Moria about it (for the Tolkien lovers among us).

Naples, the second leg, meant a return to the Museo Archeologico Nazionale and a pilgrimage to the tombs of Virgil and Leopardi. I found myself thinking of the teachers who first placed these poets in my hands: Esilda Corbin, who taught me Italian, Neapolitan, and Latin; Sister Mary Faith Dargan of Albertus Magnus College, whose love of the ancient world anchored my choice of profession and who first brought CANE to my attention; Rose Antosiewicz of UNH, who brought me to Leopardi; and Sister Juliana McNamara of Albertus Magnus, whose course “Dante and His Times” began with Boethius, insisting we build the scaffolding before approaching the Comedy. Caserta, Paestum, and Herculaneum each added their own weight: Versailles transposed to the Italian Baroque, the Temple of Neptune whose fantastic proportions still govern the sacred space they were built to hold, and a Roman neighborhood of unexpected richness finally given a full day of its own.

The third leg brought Florence and Emilia-Romagna. In Florence, for the first time, I had hours alone with my thoughts: time to walk with Dante, to read Santa Croce’s Franciscan façade with deliberate attention, and to stand before Masaccio and Bonaiuto’s Aquinas in the Cappella Spagnola at Santa Maria Novella. Santarcangelo di Romagna on June 2nd, Italy’s national holiday, was a celebration with friends and collaborators Mayor Filippo Sacchetti and city councilor Tiziano Corbelli, whose collaborations with the City of Portsmouth and UNH continue to open doors for future students. The trip closed in Bologna alongside my UNH students, and if the journey had reconnected me with the memory of my own teachers, it closed by reconnecting me, as a teacher, with theirs: watching them move through that magnificent city with growing confidence and curiosity was a true blessing.

The Renata Poggioli Award is offered in even years with a December 15th deadline, and CANE offers further awards annually. I cannot recommend the experience of applying with sufficient warmth. This award did not simply fund a journey: it made possible a sustained act of renewal in which the texts I teach and write about became, again, places one can actually go, and people, living and long gone, one can actually visit. I am profoundly grateful to CANE for that gift, and I encourage every member of this community to explore the full roster of what this organization so generously offers.

The author is a Lecturer in the Department of Classics, Humanities and Italian Studies at the University of New Hampshire and a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature (Littérature générale et comparée) at the Université de Montréal.