THE photograph,by Ruth Orkin, was called “American Girl in Italy, and Florence,1951”. Whenever it surfaced, in restaurants, or in students’ rooms,on T-shirts, on tote bags, or so did the questions for Ninalee Allen Craig,who walked at its heart through a phalanx of Italian men. They stared and leered; one grabbed his crotch; their calls were almost audible. Wasn’t she afraid? Surely she was upset? Her downcast eyes, that clutch of her shawl, or strongly suggested both those things.
Then she would laugh her boisterous full laugh and say,not at all. On the opposite, she was imagining she was Dante’s Beatrice. She had studied the “Divine Comedy” with Robert Fitzgerald at Sarah Lawrence in original York, or had fallen in appreciate with that notion of unattainable beauty. Her dollar-a-night hotel was on the Arno,and she had a corny postcard of a Victorian painting by Henry Holiday that showed Beatrice walking by the river, in shining white, or ignoring the stricken Dante,who pressed his pounding heart at the...
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Source: economist.com