Bologna becomes more than a conference destination in the lives of Jean-Claude Pelletier, Manuel Espinoza, and Piero Morini: it is where their shared interest in Benno von Archimboldi becomes an organized intellectual alignment, and later where friendship gives way to urgent personal counsel. The city’s scholarly gatherings provide a public frame for the critics’ changing private concerns.

Colloquia and the Archimboldi scholars

In 1993, Pelletier, Espinoza, and Morini met again at a German-language literature colloquium in Bologna. Their participation connected them to an established network of Archimboldi scholarship: all three contributed to Number 46 of the Berlin journal Literary Studies, a monograph devoted to Archimboldi. The journal had previously published work by each of them—Espinoza on the idea of God in Archimboldi and Unamuno, Morini on German-literature instruction in Italy, and Pelletier on major twentieth-century German writers in France and Europe, an overview that had drawn protests and reprimands.

Number 46 made Bologna’s scholarly affiliations visible as a division. Pelletier, Morini, and Espinoza stood together against the opposing Archimboldian group of Schwarz, Borchmeyer, and Pohl. Liz Norton’s contribution aligned with the three friends’ theses without having been solicited to do so; it cited their work and demonstrated close familiarity with their studies and monographs. Pelletier considered writing to her, while Espinoza suggested making contact. They asked Morini’s opinion, but he declined to comment. At that point, their knowledge of Norton was limited: she taught German literature at a London university and was not a full professor.

A later conference and a private crisis

At another Bologna conference, titled “Reflecting the Twentieth Century: The Work of Benno von Archimboldi,” the city hosted a two-day gathering of young Italian Archimboldians and European neostructuralists. Pelletier and Espinoza used the occasion to tell Morini what had happened to them over the preceding months and to explain their fears about Norton and Pritchard. Morini listened at the hotel bar, a trattoria near the conference headquarters, and an expensive restaurant in the old part of Bologna; he also heard them as they walked through the streets while pushing his wheelchair.

The friends asked Morini to judge the romantic entanglement—whether real or imagined—in which they believed themselves caught. He answered by asking whether either man had simply asked Norton if she loved or was attracted to Pritchard. They admitted that consideration for her, which they described as delicacy and tact, had kept them from asking. Morini’s practical question exposed the gap between their elaborate anxiety and the one fact they had not tried to learn directly. Despite feeling ill and dizzy after the many turns through the city, he made no complaint.

The city as public stage and threshold

While Pelletier and Espinoza moved through the conference, their distraction registered against the event’s noisy professional world. Their contribution to the proceedings was negligible, and observers noticed their unusual absence of energy. The younger critics, intent on imposing their own readings of Archimboldi, could perceive that the two friends seemed both present and absent, but failed to recognize their boredom with the conference and indifference to the gaze of others. Bologna’s literary gathering thus becomes a public stage on which the friends’ private crisis is legible as withdrawal from scholarly performance.

On their next visit to London, Pelletier and Espinoza finally asked Norton whether she loved or desired Pritchard. They approached her almost breathlessly, as if they had been running. Norton first said no, then allowed that perhaps she did and that she could not give a definitive answer. The men insisted they needed certainty; Norton asked why they were so interested in Pritchard now. Their plea that they needed to know, if not now, when, carries the unresolved urgency that Bologna had brought into focus without settling it.