New York and Florida, 2015

My journey in the autumn of 2015 began under the sign of a surprise. Anca was turning ninety, and my arrival in New York had been prepared together with Bebi. I was coming to take part in her birthday celebration, but, as often happens on such journeys, the initial pretext opened onto a whole succession of encounters: family, the city, the Metropolitan Opera, former students, then Florida, Bebi’s house, Virginia Zeani and Key West.

Seen in retrospect, this vacation is not merely a series of places visited. It is a small network of memories: Anca and Tibi’s family New York, the cultural New York of museums and the Metropolitan Opera, the professional New York of former students, and then Bebi’s Florida, with its warm, domestic rhythm, yet full of surprises.

Arrival in New York

I landed at Newark and reached Anca’s home around noon. My arrival was meant to be a surprise, prepared together with Bebi. At the entrance to the building I told the doorman that I wanted to surprise Mrs. Salomon. He understood and let me go up without announcing me.

The apartment was on the fourteenth floor. I rang the bell, and when Anca opened the door and saw me standing in front of her, she burst into tears. Bebi, who had been the accomplice in this small family staging, was out in the city precisely so as not to disturb the scene of the meeting. At that moment, before the restaurant, before the photographs and all the other episodes of the journey, Anca’s birthday had already become what it was meant to be: an unexpected and deeply affectionate encounter.

During those days I also photographed Anca’s living room. They are not spectacular images, but that is precisely why they matter: the large window, the furniture, the paintings, the plants, the low table, the objects gathered into an interior long inhabited. Before the restaurant and the group photographs, there was this quieter domestic space, where Anca’s presence could perhaps be felt most clearly.

From the first days there are also images of Manhattan. The city appears with its familiar verticality: glass buildings, straight streets, yellow taxis, traffic, pedestrian crossings, the bustle of a place that never seems to stop. It was not a New York discovered for the first time, but one revisited, added to my American memory.

Fig. 1. First walks through Manhattan, October 29, 2015.

Fig. 2. Anca’s living room, New York, October 30, 2015.

Anca’s Birthday Celebration

The reason for the trip was Anca’s birthday. She was turning ninety, and the celebration took place at a Romanian restaurant in New York. It was one of those family gatherings in which the joy of the present inevitably blends with the feeling of time passing. Tibi was already ill and was brought there for a few hours so that he, too, could be present. He was weak, visibly suffering, but his presence gave the moment a discreet gravity. He even spoke, in a way that transformed the anniversary into a family image deeper than a simple festive dinner.

I remember especially Anca’s dance with Bebi. It was a luminous image, almost unbelievable in the contrast between age, illness, distances and the energy of that moment. Anca and Bebi belonged to the same extended family history, but each carried behind her another path, another geography, another experience of America. Their dance remained, for me, one of the central emotional images of the journey.

Fig. 3. At the Romanian restaurant in New York, on the evening of Anca’s birthday celebration.

Fig. 4. Tibi, weakened but present, speaking during the birthday dinner.

Fig. 4a. At the end of Tibi’s speech, Anca thanks him with a tender gesture.

Fig. 4b. Anca, invited to dance by the husband of a friend, who had returned for the first time to such a gathering after months of immobility.

Fig. 5. Anca dancing with Bebi — the luminous image of the evening.

The birthday table, with familia and friends gathered around Anca — Fig. 6. The birthday table, with family and friends gathered around Anca.

Walks through New York

Between the family gatherings and the evenings at the Metropolitan Opera, there were a few walks through the city. On October 31, New York also had its special Halloween atmosphere. For a European, American Halloween has something theatrical and childlike about it, but in New York it becomes almost a street spectacle, naturally integrated into the life of the city.

Central Park was, as always, a pause for breath. Autumn could still be seen in the colors of the trees, in the light filtered through foliage, in the sheen of the water and in the perspective of the skyscrapers rising beyond the edge of the park. After compact, noisy Manhattan, the park offered another rhythm, slower and more suited to a day that was to end at the Metropolitan Opera.

Fig. 8. Halloween decorations on a New York street, October 31, 2015.

Several more photographs than I had initially kept survived from that crossing of Central Park. One sees the lake among autumn trees, the low light of late afternoon, the quiet paths and, here and there, the silhouette of skyscrapers at the edge of the park. For a few dozen minutes, the walk toward the Metropolitan Opera passed through a space that suspended Manhattan’s agitation and turned it into a kind of visual prelude to the evening.

I also remember an unusual sporting atmosphere: fences, marked lanes, spectators and runners on some of the paths. I can no longer say with certainty what race it was, but since it was October 31, on the eve of the New York City Marathon, it was very probably one of the athletic events connected with marathon weekend. For us, crossing the park toward Lincoln Center, this detail gave the walk an added energy and urban vitality.

Fig. 8.1. Entering Central Park: the first autumn colors and the lake water.

Fig. 8.2. The mirror of the water and the autumn vegetation, in the heart of the park.

Fig. 8.3. A shaded path, followed on the way toward the park’s western side.

Fig. 8.4. Water, trees and, in the distance, the outline of Manhattan.

Fig. 8.5. Reflections on the water, with the city appearing beyond the trees.

Fig. 8.6. Autumn colors and reflections on one of the park’s bodies of water.

Fig. 8.7. Another view of the lake, in the afternoon light.

Fig. 8.8. A path where fences and lanes for runners were already visible.

Fig. 8.9. Near the exit from the park, Manhattan reentered the scene.

Fig. 8.10. Spectators and temporary arrangements on the park paths.

Fig. 8.11. The park animated by a competition or by its preparations.

Fig. 8.12. A broad lawn, in a much calmer register than the running paths.

Fig. 8.13. A more secluded corner of the park, almost rustic in atmosphere.

Fig. 8.14. The end of the crossing: the broad lawn and skyline before the walk toward the Metropolitan.

MoMA and the Metropolitan Opera

The cultural program began with a visit to MoMA. The photographs preserve works, galleries, interior and exterior spaces, details caught in passing. Cultural New York thus opened through the museum, not as a mere tourist objective, but as a space of renewed encounter with modern art.

On October 31, 2015 I attended Tannhäuser at the Metropolitan Opera. The Lincoln Center building, the foyer, the audience, the lit hall and then the final applause gave that evening a particular weight. Wagner requires time, patience, surrender; it was a solemn, long evening, suited to the city in which I found myself.

Fig. 10. Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center, October 31, 2015.

Fig. 11. The foyer at the Metropolitan Opera.

Fig. 12. The Metropolitan Opera auditorium on the evening of Tannhäuser.

On November 2 I returned to the Met for Tosca. If Tannhäuser had brought Wagnerian breadth, Tosca brought Italian intensity, more direct, more theatrical. From that evening there also remained an audio recording connected with the aria Vissi d’arte, with Angela Gheorghiu, a sign that sometimes the memory of a journey is preserved not only in images, but also in fragments of sound.

Fig. 13. Applause at the end of Tannhäuser, October 31, 2015.

Fig. 14. The end of Tosca, Metropolitan Opera, November 2, 2015.

New York Encounters

The days spent in New York also had a professional and emotional dimension: meetings with people connected to my university past. I met former students who had long been settled in America. In such reunions, the distance between professor and student changes naturally: the memory of the original relationship remains, but over it are laid time, careers, families and the experience of a life lived far from the country.

I also saw Mariana Necula again, my former colleague, together with her husband Nick, also a professor. We met at Petrossian, in an elegant setting suited to a calm conversation, between memories, the present and impressions of New York.

I also met again Edi and Roxana, my former students, married and settled in New York. Both had graduated from the Politehnica, but their lives had also opened toward other forms of culture. Edi loved classical music and opera, while Roxana was a writer and poet. The meeting with them linked, quite naturally, the cultural part of the journey — the evenings at the Metropolitan Opera — with my memory as a professor.

Fig. 15. Meeting with former students in New York, November 1, 2015.

Fig. 16. At Petrossian, with Mariana Necula and Nick.

Fig. 17. With Edi and Roxana, former students settled in New York.

Toward Florida

After the dense days in New York, I left for Florida. I landed at Fort Lauderdale and was picked up at the airport by some of Bebi’s neighbors, from the same community in which she had her villa. The Florida vacation had been offered to me by Bebi. With her was Aniko, a niece who had come from Germany for Anca’s birthday.

Bebi was then about eighty-five, but she drove on all our outings: through the town where the community was located, to supermarkets, to the pool, on the visit to Virginia Zeani and then, for a whole day, as far as Key West. That image has remained strong: Bebi at the wheel, in command of the route and the program, energetically organizing the entire stay.

Fig. 18. Arrival at Bebi’s house in Florida.

Fig. 19. Welcome dinner at Bebi’s house.

Bebi’s House and the Florida Community

Bebi’s villa was in a gated community, surrounded by walls and with a barrier at the entrance, as many such residential settlements in Florida are. It was an ordered, protected, almost suspended world: low houses, quiet streets, well-kept lawns, palm trees and a communal swimming pool that served as a meeting place.

There I met Pupet — or Poupet, as it appears in the photographic folder — a friend of Bebi’s. She was, I think, originally from Transylvania or Hungary; in any case, she and Bebi spoke Hungarian together. We met during the day at the pool, sunbathed, talked, and on two evenings Bebi and her friends organized small parties in my honor. For me, after dense, familial and cultural New York, Florida had another rhythm: slower, brighter, more domestic, yet not without its own sociability.

Fig. 20. At the pool of the community where Bebi lived.

Fig. 21. The Wildflowers residential community in Florida.

The Visit to Virginia Zeani

One of the moments I especially wanted during that vacation was the visit to Virginia Zeani, in Palm Beach County. The idea had been mine. I admired her, just as I admire Celibidache. For me, Zeani was not only a great Romanian soprano who had reached the world’s stages, but one of those artistic personalities who leave the impression of a singularity difficult to explain only through career, repertoire or success.

Maria Callas remains, of course, the absolute diva of the twentieth century. I feel no need to diminish Callas in order to elevate Zeani. But I always felt that Virginia Zeani belonged to that same rare family of artists for whom the voice is not merely an instrument, but a destiny. Zeani told me that she and Callas were friends. They both had houses at Fregene, near Rome, and saw each other from time to time. They were, however, different temperaments: Callas carried, perhaps inevitably, the aura of the great tragic diva; Zeani was more modest, more withdrawn, less concerned with her own mythology.

Zeani also told me an anecdote that circulates, in fact, in some evocations of her career: Maria Callas, she said, did not fear Renata Tebaldi, the rival consecrated by the public history of opera, as much as she feared Virginia Zeani. I do not know how much of this was verifiable truth and how much was memory, legend or an echo of backstage conversations. But the fact that this idea remained attached to her name says something about the place Zeani occupied among the great sopranos of the age.

For me, the meeting also had an older personal connection. Virginia Zeani came from Solovăstru, the village of my paternal grandmother, Maria Fola. My mother had once told me a small family legend: when Virginia was still a child, my grandmother may have spoken with her parents about the possibility that she might one day become a match for her son, my father, who was eight years older. It was one of those village hypotheses, perhaps uttered in passing, without any real consequence, but which, after decades, acquire a strange charm. Later, all of them ended up in Bucharest. I do not know whether the families remained in touch; I suspect they did not.

Fig. 22. The book about Virginia Zeani, received by Bebi as a gift.

Fig. 23. Visiting Virginia Zeani, Palm Beach County, November 9, 2015.

Nor should her marriage to Nicola Rossi-Lemeni be viewed simplistically. Lemeni was a celebrated bass-baritone, but also a highly cultured man, the author of volumes of poetry. Their life together had great artistic density. They filled their home with works of art, and around them there formed a world in which music, literature and the visual arts met naturally. If Zeani remained less present than Callas in the discographic and media memory of the broader public, this has more to do with her artistic destiny, her discretion and the fact that she did not build her own public legend in the same way.

Zeani nevertheless kept a deep bond with her parents. She told me that she had done everything she could to bring them to Italy, but they did not want to leave Romania. For this reason she returned to the country several times during the Ceaușescu regime, so that she could see them. Twice she even sang at Sala Palatului. It was already the period when she was gradually withdrawing from the stage, but those returns to Romania had for her not only an artistic significance, but also a filial one.

Bebi welcomed the idea of the visit very warmly. She loved concerts and opera. In Bucharest I took her twice to the opera, and in Cleveland she had gone for a period regularly to Cleveland Orchestra concerts. She was in love with Lorin Maazel, who had once been the orchestra’s director. Thus the meeting with Virginia Zeani was not for her merely an obligation as host. It was a visit into a world she understood and valued.

The two women got along very well. A book about Virginia Zeani had just appeared — its cover can be seen in the photographs — and Zeani gave it to Bebi as a gift. This gesture fixed the encounter in a warm, personal register. It was not just a photograph with a great artist, but an afternoon in which several threads crossed: Solovăstru, my family, opera, my admiration for Zeani, Bebi’s musical taste and the Romanian destiny of people who had each, in their own way, arrived very far from the place they had left.

Fig. 24. In Virginia Zeani’s house: music, memories and books.

The Road to Key West

Another day was devoted to the road to Key West. Seen now, it no longer appears merely as an excursion to the southern end of Florida, but as a journey in itself, almost a small road epic. We set out in the morning, passing first through the urban area of Miami, then south along the route that leads through Homestead and Florida City toward the chain of islands of the Florida Keys.

From there, the road becomes increasingly unusual. U.S. 1 descends through Key Largo, Islamorada, Marathon and then toward the Lower Keys, taking the name Overseas Highway. It is the famous road over the sea, a route of more than one hundred miles, linked by dozens of bridges, built in part on the traces of Henry Flagler’s old railroad, destroyed by the 1935 hurricane. In the photographs it is not always possible to tell exactly where one island ends and another begins; what remains, however, is the dominant impression: a ribbon of concrete stretched between the Atlantic, Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.

We also made a stop along the way, at a small waterside resting place, with a pier, boats, a covered terrace and the relaxed atmosphere of a fishermen’s bar. Such stops give the road a consistency that a simple map cannot convey. It was not just a long drive, but a succession of passages: city, highway, mangroves, bays, bridges, low islands, bridges again and, finally, Key West.

In Key West we stayed less than I would have liked. I would have wanted us to reach the Ernest Hemingway memorial house, one of the natural stops for any visitor interested in literature. The house on Whitehead Street, where Hemingway lived in the 1930s, was, however, too much for the time we had left. We had to return before dark, because Bebi had trouble driving at night. This renunciation too remained part of the memory: not only the places reached matter, but also those one did not manage to reach, although they were very close.

Key West thus appears in the photographs more as an end of the road than as a town explored at leisure: a table by the water, low houses, tropical vegetation and the feeling that we had reached the edge of the continent. After New York, after the opera at the Met and after the meeting with Zeani, Key West closed the journey in a brighter, almost vacation-like register, but also with a trace of haste: we had to set out back.

Fig. 25. On the road to Key West, November 11, 2015.

Fig. 26. Key West, the end of the road. Cuba cannot be seen, but it is close.

Fig. 27. Lunch in Key West, before the return drive.

The Round Trip through the Florida Keys

The following photographs follow more closely the road itself: leaving through Miami, approaching the Keys, the stop by the water, the long bridges, the afternoon return and the night reentry into Miami. They complete the three images already included above and show more clearly how important the road journey actually was.

Fig. 27.1. Leaving through Miami in the morning, the beginning of the road to the Florida Keys.

Fig. 27.2. The urban highway, with the tall silhouettes of the city left behind.

Fig. 27.3. The last views of the metropolitan area before the road opened southward.

Fig. 27.4. After Miami and Homestead, the road gradually enters the low landscape of the Keys.

Fig. 27.5. The first stretches of water and mangrove vegetation, seen from the car.

Fig. 27.6. One of the first bridges of the road, between water, sky and low islands.

Fig. 27.7. The road begins to take on its characteristic appearance: a strip of concrete over water.

Fig. 27.8. A stop at a small waterside rest place, with boats and a pier.

Fig. 27.9. The pier, the boats and the stillness of the water, during a pause in the journey.

Fig. 27.10. The waterfront restaurant, with the look of a fishermen’s bar and a resting place on a long drive.

Fig. 27.11. The open interior of the restaurant, covered with thatch and facing the water.

Fig. 27.12. A commercial and tourist corner of the stop, between souvenirs and port atmosphere.

Fig. 27.13. Back on the road: water appears again on both sides of the roadway.

Fig. 27.14. Bridges, low guardrails and the line of the horizon toward the south.

Fig. 27.15. The sea becomes ever more present, and the road seems suspended between sky and water.

Fig. 27.16. Another bridge segment, with the route stretching straight ahead.

Fig. 27.17. The long perspective of the road over water, one of the typical images of the Overseas Highway.

Fig. 27.18. Approaching the large bridges of the Middle Keys, toward Marathon and Seven Mile Bridge.

Fig. 27.19. The road over water, in the area of the long bridges toward Key West.

Fig. 27.20. The curve of the road on the bridge, with the open sea to the right.

Fig. 27.21. Water, guardrail and horizon: the repetitive rhythm of the road through the Keys.

Fig. 27.22. Seascape along the road, after crossing the major bridges.

Fig. 27.23. The return begins in the afternoon, with the concern not to spend the whole drive in darkness.

Fig. 27.24. Bridges seen again in the afternoon light, on the way back.

Fig. 27.25. The side water and the line of the bridge, photographed while moving.

Fig. 27.26. The last low islands and scattered houses, before the light faded.

Fig. 27.27. Toward evening, on the return road, with the light descending over the water.

Fig. 27.28. Reentering the Miami area at night, among lit buildings.

Fig. 27.29. Miami’s nighttime skyline, seen from the highway.

Fig. 27.30. Miami at night: the city lights after the long day on the road.

Fig. 27.31. The last lights of the road, before returning to Bebi’s domestic Florida.

The Last Evenings in Florida

The last photographs bring the vacation back into the domestic sphere: dinner at Pupet’s, Bebi’s house, objects, rooms, the car in front of the house. The ending is not spectacular, but precisely for that reason it is true. Journeys often end not with a grand image, but with details: a table, a smile, a group photograph, a short drive through the town, a stop at the supermarket, a departure prepared quietly.

For me, this vacation remains divided between two worlds: the New York of Anca’s birthday, of Tibi brought to the restaurant for a few hours and speaking there, of opera and former students; and Bebi’s Florida, with the villa in the gated community, the pool, the friends who spoke Hungarian, Virginia Zeani and the long road to Key West. Together, they make up one of those journeys in which places become important not in themselves, but through the people who inhabited them for a few days with us.

Fig. 28. Dinner at Pupet/Poupet’s, Bebi’s friend.

Fig. 29. Last images from Florida, before departure.

MoMA – separate photographic page

The visit to MoMA remained, in this page, only one episode of the New York cultural program. Because the museum photographs are numerous — the courtyard, the interior and especially the works on display — I separated this material into a dedicated page. It preserves the clearest and least redundant selection of images, without changing the order and numbering of the photographs in this main page.

See the dedicated page for the visit to MoMA

Luca Dan Șerbănați

Emeritus Professor at Politehnica University of Bucharest

Research, teaching, industry and memoirs