Bly, who chairs the Department of English, began to make the transition to her own voice with her last book, Paris in Love (Random House, 2013). The book was still published under her pen name, though it was a thinly veiled account of Bly’s own year-long journey with her family to the City of Light.

Lizzie & Dante is set on the island of Elba off the coast of Italy. It’s a vacation spot that Bly refers to as the “scruffy little island where Napoleon was exiled.” It’s also a getaway that she and her Italian husband have been visiting for years.

“It’s not like Capri, it’s not a fancy island. It’s not where the yachts go. It’s where Italians go and bring their children,” said Bly.

The island’s laid-back vibe stands in stark contrast to the Midwest where Bly was brought up by her “workaholic parents,” the poet Robert Bly and author Carol Bly. Carol Bly succumbed to ovarian cancer in 2007, a disease that Lizzie, the novel’s main character, copes with when she chooses to travel to the island rather than sustain more painful treatments.

“My heroine is making a decision about whether to go into further treatment. I think every cancer patient facing a rigorous treatment plan makes that decision, consciously or unconsciously,” said Bly, who is a cancer survivor herself. “She goes to the island with her closest friends, who became her found family.”

Lizzie arrives on the island with her oldest friend and his lover. Through them, Bly attempts to tease out questions of chosen families and the very nature of love itself.

“How we love is not necessarily determined by who we want to have sex with,” said Bly. “This book is a much wider notion of love than what I’m able to do within the bounds of 400 pages of historical romance.”

To that end, Lizzie meets and falls for an Italian chef and his 11-year-old daughter, who unwittingly further extends her notion of a found family.

“It’s my first novel and it is set in the present, so I wanted it to be something that I knew incredibly well,” said Bly. “I know Elba and I know Italian food. And while I don’t know Italian chefs, I know Italian men.”

The novel took Bly four years to write. She said she knows the ins and outs of historical romance but writing for the current moment proved a rather difficult task. Paris in Love was a contemporary memoir, but the cast of characters was primarily limited to her immediate family. For Lizzie and Dante, she wanted the story to be accessible and inclusive, which meant creating contemporary characters who Lizzie may befriend, but whose background differs from Bly’s own. To that end, Bly noted that the book went through sensitivity readings to ensure gay and Black characters read as authentic. It’s a role that Bly said didn’t exist when she taught a publishing course at Fordham, but one she said she’s thankful for now.

“That role came about over the last several years, for white authors in particular who were thinking, ‘I need to make sure this works from another person’s point of view,’” she said.

Indeed, much of what she’s learned over the course of relaunching her career as Mary Bly could become an outline for a new publishing course. She noted that though her last book was in essence a memoir, switching to her own name required negotiations with her publisher to come out as herself.

“Obviously, they would rather it was published as Eloisa James, but I felt that this is not a romance. This is a love story, and it has much more of the dark side of life in it because Lizzie is fighting cancer,” said Bly.

In addition, Lizzie’s love of poetry and music, to say nothing of her role as a Shakespeare scholar, align far more with author Mary Bly’s personality than that of bodice ripper novels by Eloisa James. Lizzie sings from the same Episcopalian hymn books that Bly grew up with. Lizzie reads poetry by poets who were friends of Bly’s parents. And she’s a Shakespeare professor at Fordham.

“I know that a lot of my readers automatically buy an Eloisa James book, and it did not seem fair to them to be giving them something that was considerably more challenging. And as it says on the cover, it’s a novel, not a romance,” said Bly. “Also, I thought it was a Mary Bly book. I’m the Shakespeare professor, right?”

Bly will be signing copies of the Lizzie and Dante at Homecoming on Oct. 9 in the main tent as part of the newly-launched Fordham Alumni Book Club.  

New York City, on the other hand, has the Metropolitan Opera, world-class museums, and Shakespeare in the Park. And of course, Rockefeller Center, home of the popular show 30 Rock.

For six Italian exchange students who have been studying at Fordham since August, that’s no small matter. Visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art have allowed them to take in the ways in which a young country like the United States treats items of antiquity, while living in lower Manhattan has brought pop culture of New York City into sharper focus.

“It’s like living a dream, because we’re very obsessed with American culture. We grew up with American culture, movies, and TV series,” said Marco Cataldi, a native of Calabria, Italy.

“When you experience things in person, its completely different because you can actually feel the realness of something. It can be a little overwhelming.”

Marilena Simeoni, a native of Avezzano, likewise marveled at how the pace of life in New York is dramatically faster, noting that “every day you have something to do, something to see, to visit.”

Cataldi, Simeoni and four others studying at Fordham this semester are the inaugural cohort of World Cultural Heritage Studies, a three-year long partnership between Fordham and a consortium of six Italian universities that was signed last year by Fordham president Joseph M. McShane, S.J., and Stephen Freedman, Ph.D., Fordham’s late provost.

Next fall and spring, Fordham graduate students studying the humanities will likewise be invited to study at the Università di Bologna, Università di Chieti-Pescara, Università di Roma La Sapienza, Università di Roma Tor Vergata, Università di Roma Roma Tre, or Università per Stanieri di Perugia.

Education without Borders

Jo Ann Isaak, Ph.D., Fordham’s John L. Marion Chair of Art History and Music, said the goal is to emulate the European Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students  program. Since 1987, ERASMUS, as it is commonly known, has essentially eliminated borders for European students.

“Every year, students freely come and go to other universities and attend classes and have their classes accredited in their home university. This fluidity is so important,” she said.

“I taught classes in Italian universities, and in my classes, I would have students from all over, not just Italian students. So, it’s very familiar for me, and I can clearly see its advantages for American students. We are a little isolated in America, it is good to see how things are done in another country.”

In addition to Isaak’s class Contemporary Art in Exhibition, the Italian students are taking classes such as Urban Film Video Production by Mark Street,, Ph.D., associate professor of visual arts, and Rewriting the Mediterranean by Francesca Parmeggiani, Ph.D., professor of Italian and comparative literature and Making Early Music by Eric Bianchi, Ph.D., associate professor of music.

In August, the Italian exchange students along with Fordham graduates were treated to a two-week long immersion course that included trips to major landmarks and sites like Belmont’s Little Italy. Other Fordham students have also taken them on more informal outings, including one to Governor’s Island.

Simeoni said the Cloisters Museum impressed her because the displays there showed a level of attention to medieval objects that is often lacking in Italy. A visit to the African Burial Ground National Monument in lower Manhattan was also particularly moving, she said.

“It was very shocking, seeing it. We study these things in Italy, but it seems far. Here, I can perceive so much, and see how American people try to remember history in the right way,” she said.

“It’s a difficult thing, because telling history is difficult, and it should be done in the most objective way. I saw that here.”

The students in Isaak’s class worked alongside their American counterparts to put on an exhibition as well, Art for Arctic’s Sake, at the Ildiko Butler Gallery on the Lincoln Center campus. At the show’s opening on Nov. 7, students who’d organized the exhibition, the show’s post card, posters, website, and written the catalogue essays, greeted visitors while wearing buttons that said “Ask me about the art.”

Study in Italy

As part of the exchange, Fordham graduate students will have the opportunity to study for a term in Italy. Isaak encouraged students interested in courses such as Everyday Life in Pompeii, Philosophy of Science and Medicine, Novels as Travel Guides, and Magic in the Middle Ages in Italy to consult with their advisors and the dean’s office of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

“The Italian graduate students have been really fantastic to have in my class, and I’ve been happy with the ways our own students have taken on the role of host and introduced them to New York,” Isaak said.

The undergraduate students—Alexandra Bandea, Andrew DiSalvo, Marisa Folsom, Phillip Gregor, and Erin O’Flynn—spent the month of July in Rome for a Department of Visual Arts course, Photography in the Documentary Tradition. The group visited ancient architectural sites, museums, neighborhoods, and other sites throughout the city practicing basic and advanced techniques of image production. In particular, the students focused on how to craft documentary photos of the people, architecture, and culture of Italy.

“[They learned to] observe, process, and translate life into a rectangular image,” said course instructor Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock, the visual arts program’s artist-in-residence. “They considered everything as potential photographs, from the glorious Sistine Chapel, to the not-so-glorious Fiumicino Airport.”

The students’ photographs were then compiled into a 68-page book, Documentary Photography: Italy 2016, published earlier this month.

“If most photographs are exposed somewhere around 1/125th of a second, then collectively the exposure time of the images in this book adds up to barely a single second,” Apicella-Hitchcock said. “However, the impressions, both sacred and profane, that Italy has made on the group will certainly last for much longer.”

Selections of rare secular and religious pamphlets, published amidst the Italian unification from 1815 to 1880, have been digitized by Fordham Libraries as part of a new initiative to make rare scholarly materials available to the public.

Much of the trove—which consists of 1,600 pamphlets that were once the property of the 19^th-century Italian Cardinal Carlo Luigi Morichini, is available online.

“We want to share our hidden collections that aren’t accessible even to the Fordham community,” said Linda Loschiavo, director of Fordham Libraries. “As a research institution, part of the library’s mission is to give access to the scholarly collections, as well as the more popular collections.”

Loschiavo said that while the library has already digitized items of importance to Fordham, New York City, and the nation (including back issues of the student newspaper, The Ram, some Tin Pan Alley sheet music, and letters from George Washington), some academic gems like the pamphlets remain relatively unknown— outside of the library staff. The pamphlets have been the property of Fordham Libraries’ special collections since 2012.

Cardinal Morichini, who died in 1879, served in several administrative, ministerial, and diplomatic posts in the mid-nineteenth century, said Timothy Ryan Mendenhall, metadata librarian at the Walsh Library. Mendenhall is heading up the organizing and digitizing of the Morichini and other collections.

During the cardinal’s tenure, Italy experienced sweeping changes that brought about the secularization of civil, political, and educational institutions. The church lost administrative control over the former Papal States, much of its wealth, its land holdings, and its political influence—some of which is documented and debated in the pamphlets.

The issues associated with unification, however, represent only a portion of the cardinal’s interests and concerns. He was also interested in the spiritual care of the poor, prison reform, and education, and he published one of the most comprehensive surveys of such institutions at the time, said Mendenhall. He was also involved in the finances of the Papal States during a period of fiscal crisis, and helped create savings and loan institutions for the poor.

The digitization of Fordham’s files was carried out on Internet Archive and can also be found at the Digital Public Library of America. The project was made possible by a grant from the Metropolitan New York Library Council.

“This collection is one of the more hidden treasures,” she said. “Before now it was sitting in cartons.”

“There’s something bordering on spiritual when all the elements of the world by chance are in synchronicity, and you—and only you at that moment in time—are paying homage to time itself,” he said.

As artist in residence in the Department of Visual Arts and programmer for the Ildiko Butler Gallery, Lipani Gallery, and Hayden Hartnett Project Space, Apicella-Hitchcock wears several hats at Fordham. One is supervision of Documentary Photography Japan, a six-year-old course in which he chaperones six to eight students on a trip to Japan over the winter break.

Apicella-Hitchcock taught at the Tokyo University of the Arts in 2005. He said that, like New York, Tokyo is the kind of place where the more you look for things to photograph, the more interesting it becomes. He and fellow visual arts professor Joseph Lawton teach a similar course in Italy in the summer. In both cases, upon return stateside some 3,000 images are edited down to 64, which are then printed and bound in a book.

Both are digital courses. Apicella-Hitchcock said the goal is to appeal to students with digital photography, which has become democratized thanks to the ubiquitousness of cameras on phones.

“But then we take these interested parties and hook them into the more sophisticated photography, which is photographic syntax: putting together sequences of images that build up and create a larger meaning than the individual integers,” he said.

“The meaning in between the photographs is where the poetry of the art form comes out. One can start to create flashbacks or premonitions of what is to come. One can definitely develop subtleties, so it’s not just the bombast of a greatest hits.”

One of the joys of working with a small group of students is witnessing how creative they can be, since they have no pre-conceived notions about the craft, he said.

“I say to students, only you can do what you’re doing at this point in time. Only you have your sensitivities, your history, your cultural background, your gender background, and your age. And since you’re college students, your youthful enthusiasm is an asset. Your fearlessness allows you to barge into situations that you have no businesses being in, had you thought about it. And consequently, you get amazing primary research.”

With the Ildilko Butler gallery, Apicella-Hitchcock works with students who have finished their senior projects, faculty showing off their latest works, and artists whose projects fit the bill for a specific theme. Sometimes it’s as thematically open as landscapes; other times its more specific, like the 2013 collection of art forgeries that was timed around the Fordham/FBI International Conference on Cyber Security.

“I corral artists, I trust them. They make something, and afterwards you find sometimes tenuous but genuine connections between the works, which is an exploration for them and for myself as well, which is why [artists]do it,” he said.

He lists Gary Metz: Quaking Aspen: A Lyric Complaint, which Apicella-Hitchcock curated with Lawton in the winter of 2014, as one of his favorite exhibits. Metz took black and white landscape pictures of Aspen, Colorado, that challenged the prevailing notions of nature as sublime, heroic, and unspoiled. Metz assumed the viewer was intelligent, and could handle a certain amount of ambiguity, Apicella-Hitchcock said.

“Unlike a stereotypical Hollywood film, you don’t see the ending coming from a mile away. It’s more like European art film, where, even though you’ve watched the movie 20 times, you’re still not sure what its about,” he said.

Advances in technology have opened up new realms in photography, and Apicella-Hitchcock said he’s particularly intrigued by cameras that can now operate in extremely low light, without the need for flashes. But in the end, he said a good photograph always depends more on the human behind the camera.

“I think it was Paul Strand who said in order to make a good photograph, you have to have something to say about the world. Photography is still all about encoding that image with the photographer’s sensibilities, intelligence, and sensitivity to whoever or whatever was in front of them,” he said.