Accademia di Romania: a Romanian gateway in Rome

My interest in the Accademia di Romania was born only a few weeks after my arrival in Rome. I was still in that state of suspension typical of the beginning of emigration: I had a great deal of free time, few points of support, and an almost physical need to discover the city in which I had arrived. I walked through Rome without a precise plan, allowing myself to be led by streets, parks, squares, and buildings that seemed to carry within them a memory older than any personal design.

That is how, one day, I reached Valle Giulia and stood before the beautiful building of the Accademia di Romania. I knew that this institution had been founded in the time of Nicolae Iorga and Vasile Pârvan as a Romanian cultural school in Rome, in the spirit of the great foreign academies of the Italian capital. The building had a dignity that impressed me immediately. For a Romanian newly arrived in exile, it seemed a sign of continuity: proof that Romania had once had a natural and dignified cultural presence in this city.

I tried to enter and visit it, but I was not allowed in. The Accademia was, in practice, closed. I would later learn that, after 1947, the old Romanian school had ceased to function, and the building had gone through periods of abandonment, improper uses, and administrative survival. It had reopened in 1969 as the Romanian Library in Rome, but after the Revolution it had again remained in an uncertain state, without leadership suited to the new historical moment.

For me, this situation was difficult to accept. It was not merely a beautiful building, placed in a privileged area of Rome. It was an institution that should have represented Romanian culture in one of Europe's great cultural centers. After 1989, precisely such an institution should have been set in motion again, not left in a state of administrative waiting.

I then began to ask what could be done. I insisted with A.N., then Minister of Foreign Affairs, that he should accelerate the appointment of a director. On that occasion I also learned of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' intention to extend its protective wing over the Accademia di Romania, invoking the financial difficulties of the Romanian Academy. The situation was more delicate, however, because, in the spirit of the founding act, the director had to be appointed by the Romanian Academy and, in the original form, had to be an academician.

I then went to see Mihai Drăgănescu, President of the Romanian Academy. I knew and respected him, and he immediately understood the symbolic importance of the matter. He promised me that he would take care of it. And he did. He appointed Zoe Dumitrescu-Bușulenga as director; she had just become a full member of the Romanian Academy and therefore met the condition of academic prestige that at the time seemed essential for that position.

That is how Zoe Dumitrescu-Bușulenga — Zozi, as we would later call her in our close circle — entered our Roman life. Her appointment gave the Accademia a different breath. The institution was not yet what it had been between the two world wars, nor did it have the material means to regain its former brilliance fully, but Zoe's presence restored to it a cultural authority and a Romanian centrality that it had lost.

Looking back, one must say that the status of the Accademia changed over time. After Zoe, its directors were no longer necessarily academicians, and the institution gradually entered a more complex administrative regime, in which scientific activity, cultural activity, and management depend on different institutions of the Romanian state. The Accademia remains one of the Romanian cultural centers abroad, but it probably no longer has the symbolic pre-eminence it had between the two world wars.

For me, however, the Accademia di Romania was never merely an institution. It was the first place in Rome where I felt that Romanian cultural history could continue, even after the violent rupture of emigration. Around it would gather people, events, sympathies, tensions, and unexpected encounters. One of these encounters would become, a few years later, decisive for my approach to Italian research.

Zoe Dumitrescu-Bușulenga at the Accademia di Romania

I am not trying here to write a biography of Zoe Dumitrescu-Bușulenga, nor to judge, in a few pages, an intellectual destiny crossed by the complicated decades of Romanian communism. I am interested above all in the Zoe I knew in Rome, during the years when she directed the Accademia di Romania: a woman of great culture, penetrating intelligence, and an intellectual authority that transformed the institution into a living place.

Zoe Dumitrescu-Bușulenga arrived in Rome towards the end of 1991, together with her husband, Apostol Bușulenga. At the gatherings where I saw him, he was a quiet and discreet man who usually remained in the background. He was a lawyer and, as far as I knew, of Aromanian origin. Zoe, by contrast, filled the space around her. She had a powerful intellectual presence, an impressive cultural memory, and the self-assurance of someone who had lived through decades of university, academic, and public life.

One of her first concerns was to bring together around the Accademia di Romania the Romanians living in Rome. Through the Embassy and the relationships she was building, she tried to restore the institution to an active cultural role. Whenever she organised a lecture, a film screening, or an exhibition, or when Christmas, Easter, or other important occasions were celebrated, she welcomed us with great kindness and always had a good word for everyone.

That was how I learned that she had heard about me from my professor, Mircea Petrescu, whom she knew from the university and public circles of their generation. Their paths of education, however, had been different: in 1947–1948 Zoe had held a scholarship at the “Maxim Gorky” Institute of Foreign Languages in Bucharest, while Mircea Petrescu had worked towards his doctorate between 1960 and 1963 at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute.

I knew that Zoe had been a member of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party and a deputy in the Great National Assembly. I remembered seeing her name on the election posters of the Front of Socialist Democracy and Unity in the 1980s. I was aware of all these things. I did not ignore them, but neither did I place them at the centre of our relationship. After the Revolution, I had re-established good relations with Mircea Petrescu, while my relationship with Zoe developed in Rome on a different level: that of personal affinity, culture, and a form of solidarity among Romanians living far from their country.

I also knew that Zoe had been greatly loved by her students. Her lectures on comparative literature attracted considerable interest, and around her there had already grown the legend of a professor of immense culture, capable of linking literature with music, painting, architecture, religion, and history. Therefore, when we met in Rome, we were both predisposed to like one another. And that is exactly what happened. Zoe became attached to us, and we became attached to Zozi.

During the first period, when she had not yet built up a wide circle of acquaintances in Rome, she would sometimes visit us, or we would take her by car on drives through the city’s historic districts. In the course of our conversations, I discovered that she had known my uncle, General Niculescu-Cociu, who, in his gallant manner, had once courted her at a soirée. “I have an extraordinary appeal for retired generals,” she added mischievously.

Thanks to Zozi, we were almost always present at the events organised by the Accademia and, after they ended, we would often remain talking with her. For us, the Accademia was no longer merely the magnificent building in Valle Giulia that had once seemed almost inaccessible. It had begun to become a living place, a meeting space, and Zoe was at the centre of it.

Shortly after her arrival in Rome, Zoe decided to dedicate one room of the building to a chapel. She decorated it with icons and invited a Romanian priest, who served in Bari, to come to Rome on Sundays or on important religious holidays. I too attended these services. There I saw how profound her devotion was. It was not a decorative or conventional religiosity, but a deep dimension of her personality, one that would become increasingly visible toward the end of her life, when she would withdraw to Văratec and become a nun under the name Mother Benedicta.

Her relationships in the Romanian cultural world were enormous. Almost everyone who mattered in Romanian literature, art, or culture was known to her: former students, colleagues, friends, or interlocutors. I remember an episode that took place in our own home. On the wall we had a painting by Alin Gheorghiu, entitled, like many of his works, Hanging Gardens. It was an abstract painting, or at least that was how we saw it. When I tried to explain where it came from, Zoe interrupted me abruptly: “What hanging gardens? Don't you see that it is the Mother of God? I told Alin the same thing.”

The story of the painting, of my encounters with Alin Gheorghiu, and of his technique inspired by religious painting on glass deserves to be told separately. I have recounted it on a dedicated page.

This reaction was characteristic of her. She had a gaze capable of going beyond the conventional explanation of a work and immediately giving it a personal, cultural, sometimes spiritual interpretation. It was not a simple aesthetic observation, but her way of placing everything within a network of meanings. For her, painting, literature, music, architecture, and faith were not separate compartments, but forms of the same cultural breath.

Zoe had great difficulty moving, however. In practice, she limped and had to be helped when she walked. At one point she received from Bucharest an official car with a driver, which made her movements around Rome much easier. Until then, we and other close friends helped her as best we could. This physical fragility contrasted with the strength of her public discourse. When she spoke at events organized by the Accademia — artists arriving from Romania, Romanian films, painting exhibitions on the ground floor of the building — she managed to transform a simple presentation into a small oral essay, full of multicultural references.

She had traveled through Europe and could speak about cities, museums, churches, painters, musicians, writers, and architects with an ease that impressed. It was not merely erudition, but a living memory of places. She had the rare ability to bring out immediately the essential characteristic of a place or a work, to connect a façade, a fresco, a literary text, and a spiritual theme.

I also remember an incident triggered indirectly by the atmosphere at the Accademia. When we arrived in Rome, we found many Romanians there, some settled for many years, others more recently arrived. Among them was Elena Cernei, our great mezzo-soprano, settled in the Eternal City together with her husband. They too came to the events organized at the Accademia, but they did not really deign to speak except with important people: the ambassador, the consuls, and other official figures.

On a sunny afternoon, before the start of an event, we were sitting in the garden of the Accademia. The ladies had gathered in one corner, while we men were in another corner of the garden. Suddenly I heard raised voices from the ladies' side, among them Mrs. Cernei's voice and my wife's. I went closer and saw that the two were confronting each other over a matter that A. had triggered without realizing it.

Not knowing Elena Cernei's Bessarabian origin, A. had said something, probably not very flattering, about Bessarabian women. That was enough. Elena Cernei immediately took offense and began throwing accusations at a woman whom, in fact, she knew only by sight. I hurried to get my wife out of the hornet's nest and thought that the incident would end there.

It did not end there. The following week, we came to a concert organized at the Accademia. At the end, as after all events, we passed almost in single file to thank Zoe for the invitation. When my turn came, I bent down to kiss her, and she whispered, with the air of conveying necessary information: “You should know that Cernei has told everyone that you are Securitate people.”

That was sometimes the atmosphere of the Romanian diaspora in Italy. Around the Accademia gathered valuable people, artists, intellectuals, diplomats, old exiles and newcomers, but there also gathered suspicions, pride, small hierarchies, resentments, and reflexes brought from home. An imprudent word could immediately become an accusation, and the most convenient accusation in those years was that of ties with the Securitate. Zoe knew how to navigate all these tensions with a combination of kindness, authority, and discreet irony.

During the years spent in Rome, Apostol Bușulenga died while they were in Romania. When Zoe returned, she was dressed in black and visibly changed. Mourning seemed to have taken from her part of the energy with which she had animated the Accademia until then. It was clear that she could no longer continue for long to delight us with the same presence.

After the end of her directorship at the Accademia, I tried to see her again in Bucharest. I went to her home near Sfinții Voievozi. I reached the landing of the apartment, rang the bell, but no one opened, although movements could be seen through the thin voile curtains of the entrance door. I am certain that it was not Zozi moving in the room. It was one of those attempts at reunion that do not come to pass and that, precisely through their failure, close an epoch.

For me, however, the years spent around the Accademia remained not only a cultural and emotional memory. They also had an unexpected consequence for my professional path in Italy. In that Romanian space in Rome, reconstructed around Zoe, I would meet Bruno M., Italian professor of Romanian at the University of Pisa. Through him another world would gradually open: that of the CNR researchers, with whom I would remain connected for more than twenty years.

Bruno M.: a bridge toward CNR

In this world of the Accademia I met Bruno M.. He was a philologist by training, professor of Romanian Language and Literature at the University of Pisa, a scholar of Romanian language and literature, and a literary translator from Romanian into Italian. He belonged to that rare category of Italians for whom Romania was not an exotic curiosity, but a culture known from within, through language, literature, friendships, and frequent journeys.

Bruno was very interested in what was happening in Romania after the Revolution, not only culturally, but also in university, political, and social life. He had friends in Romanian universities, traveled often to the country, and was aware of many of the concerns of that early transition. At the Accademia he was, therefore, a natural interlocutor: Italian by training and profession, but close to the Romanian world through a long familiarity with its language and its people.

There is no need to insist too much on Bruno as a character. He was sociable, charming, and moved easily between worlds and people. For the thread of this story, what matters most is that he had a circle of friends in Rome, and among them was Domenico P., a researcher at the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche.

Domenico P. was an electronics engineer specialized in medical informatics. In 1993–1994 he was working at the Istituto di Studi sulla Ricerca e Documentazione Scientifica — ISRDS — an institute of CNR where a small group of researchers interested in applying informatics to the medical field had formed. The group had expertise in documentation, the organization of scientific information, and biomedical fields, but felt the need for a specialist in informatics proper, capable of giving greater technical consistency to the projects and articles through which the existence and development of this research direction had to be justified.

Bruno introduced me to Domenico one evening at an Ethiopian restaurant in Rome. I remember that meeting not for its spectacular quality, but for the consequences it would have. It was one of those apparently accidental circumstances which, seen later, seem to have been placed exactly where they needed to be.

Domenico invited me to meet his research group at CNR. That is how I met Fabrizio R. and Daniela L., who at that time were working on the computerization of clinical trials. The topic was new to me, but it was not foreign to my way of thinking. I came from computer science, software engineering, modeling, and a concern for complex systems. Here I found a new application domain in which the problems of representing, organizing, circulating, and interpreting information had direct stakes.

They proposed that I join the group, and for this purpose they obtained a research fellowship for me. That is how my approach to CNR began. Not through a planned competition, not through a professional strategy prepared in advance, but through a chain of encounters: Accademia di Romania, Zoe Dumitrescu-Bușulenga, Bruno M., Domenico P., then Fabrizio R. and Daniela L..

Looking back, I realize that this entry into Italian research had a discreet logic. For me, the Accademia had been a Romanian gateway in Rome; Bruno was the cultural bridge toward the Italian world; Domenico and his group opened the gate toward CNR. From that moment on, my professional and scientific activity in Italy would be linked, for more than twenty years, to research in medical informatics.

Links to other pages

• Hanging Gardens. The Story of a Painting by Alin Gheorghiu — the episode involving Zoe Dumitrescu-Bușulenga, Alin Gheorghiu, and the interpretation of the painting Hanging Gardens.
• Medical informatics and digital health — the thematic research direction that would develop after my approach to CNR.
• Transnational Professional Maturity — the synthesis page for this stage.