Gustavo Piga parks a modest Fiat under the umbrella pines at Due Santi and climbs out. I’ve been deputized to greet him before his lecture to the students on the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath. What do you say to a professor of economics from the University of Rome? What do you say to a man as he comes back to a place he knew as his grandparents’ home? Honestly, I’m a little intimidated. He was probably a young man, not much older than these Rome students, when the University of Dallas came and swept this place away from his family, away from him, and I hear he hasn’t been back more than once or twice since.
“Hello,” I say. “Welcome — welcome back — to Due Santi.” It’s all I can stumble out.
He looks up at the umbrella pines, around to the vineyard and up toward the villa. “I am so happy the university took over this place, and kept it so beautiful,” he says. He’s a man about my age, balding like me, with a warm smile. His shoes, his tweed jacket and knit tie, aren’t smashingly stylish in that intimidating Italian way. Suddenly he’s just another academic, and he claps me on the shoulder and shakes my hand. “I’m Gustavo. We have some time before the talk, don’t we? Can we go up to the villa?”
We enter the villa, and I unlock the doors to the salone. It’s been kept as a lovely living room, a place where faculty parties are held, where faculty children celebrate birthdays. Gustavo takes two steps in and stops, taking in everything. He takes a deep breath and grins. “I can hear my grandfather right now. He would sit up here and blast Beethoven on his huge stereo with all the windows open.” He gestures around the room, showing how it filled up with musical Sturm und Drang.
We walk to the window and look down at the tennis court. He shows me where the glass broke when the Allied bombers dropped errant ordnance on what is now the field outside the mensa. “He never fixed that window. He always showed it to people and proudly said it was American bombers that did that. He was very pro-American, my grandfather.”
This is the story of a family. Frankly, as Gustavo told me, “The story of the villa is the story of Italy in the 20th century.” It’s the story of a family who to this day love that we, the family of the University of Dallas, are now a part of their family’s history.
For their time, they were an unusual couple, an unlikely international pair from opposite sides of the globe. Lorenzo Piga was born 11 days before the beginning of the 20th century in a small Sardinian town, the son of the local lawyer and the daughter of a fine family. Edythe Kollerstrom was the even more adventurous one, the 25-year-old Australian school teacher who came to Italy to study the Montessori method — and, it seems, to get away from a failed romance with an Indian diplomat. When she left on the trip, she had no idea that she would not return home for many years. But she met Renzo, they fell in love, and in short order they married in 1932.
The villa was completed in 1940, just as Italy was joining the war and Gabriella was joining the family; Edythe was not so excited about having another child, but both she and Renzo were ecstatic to welcome a girl, so they named the house Villa Gabriella in her honor. (Few Romers know the villa has a name.) “We were of course jealous,” said their son Dario, “so our parents named the two umbrella pines at the front gate Guglielmo” — their other son, Gustavo’s zio — “and Dario to placate us.” (Even fewer today know that these two grand trees, at the old gate behind the villa, also have names.)
Seven-year-old Guglielmo was a Balilla (the Fascist Boy Scout-like organization) and remembered the day when Mussolini was arrested. “I started crying and was surprised to see my father deliriously happy. He was the most internationally minded person in the office and was certain we would lose the war; 99% of Italians thought the war was won when France was invaded. Italians loved to divide up the spoils. Mussolini was not stupid, but he had never been outside of Italy; he didn’t know the power of the Americans, of the British.” Then came June 4, 1944, and the liberation of Rome. “The best day of my life,” Guglielmo said; he tasted white bread for the first time, given to him by American soldiers.
After the war and the cleanup, the family grew into prosperity. Every Sunday became a kind of open house at Due Santi, with Renzo loving to grill and carve meats as he hosted cookouts. An international group including a Norwegian consul and his English wife, a lung doctor and his wife Yvonne, and another couple began to gather regularly; the four couples dubbed themselves the “Otto Santi” and enjoyed playing cards. Soon the pool, and later the tennis courts, were added as a way for the children to have something to do on these long summer afternoons. With ten acres in which to play, there was not always full supervision. The boys loved to find unfired ammunition from the war, empty out the gunpowder and set it alight; one such explosion knocked down a small stone wall.
In the 1970s, Italy descended into the anni di piombo, the “years of lead,” a time of economic shocks — particularly provoked by the oil shocks from Middle East wars and turmoil — and domestic terrorism. It can be strange for Romers, so full of the joy of going to beautiful Italy, to realize that the university started the program in some of the most troubling years in the country’s history. Strikes and threats of violence were frequent; you can hear tales of these from 1970s Romers, who laugh them off, but there was real trouble in the country. But the biggest blow came in May 1976, when Edythe died after a rapid illness. Gabriella had come home to be with her in February and stayed on to help her father before moving to the house in the Flaminio district, on Piccola Londra, where she lived with her second husband. Renzo slowed down, and the villa was slipping a bit. He considered moving to a nursing home, but Guglielmo talked him out of it. “I told him he’d be bored out of his skull and die in three years. Here he had family that loved him.” So Renzo stayed on for another nine years. His own final illness took him on November 1, 1985, just a little short of his 86th birthday.
All of the family talks about their devastation at the death of the paterfamilias, not because he was loved more than Edythe, said Nicole Dunaway, Gabriella’s daughter, but because he was the center of the life at Due Santi. Immediately the family had to decide what to do with the villa. Would Guglielmo buy out his siblings? Would they cut it into apartments and sell or rent them? Nicole and Gustavo, then 20 and 23, even had the idea of buying it themselves, but none of the family could quite make these plans work, and they reluctantly sought a buyer for the property. Gabriella talked about it in terms of “sorrow” and “desolation” but also said that “it was too hard to keep the lovely, too-big old place with none of us living there.”
And again the history of modern Italy parallels the story of the villa, for who stepped in to purchase their beloved home but an American institution — not a wealthy financier or a Hollywood movie star, but a strange little Catholic university that had recently lost its lease on the home of its superb Rome Program and was looking for a permanent home.
It’s a beautiful, mild summer evening in 2017, and the Piga family have assembled back at Due Santi for the first time in many years. Nicole has asked Dean Peter Hatlie for permission to celebrate her 50th birthday on the campus, and all day long friends and the extended family have arrived. A chef from a favorite restaurant has been brought in to prepare a meal for dozens. The party moves from the pool to the forno patio and eventually to tents and tables set up on the mensa field. And what is simply wonderful is the gratitude every member of the family offers to me, to Dr. Hatlie and to the university for having preserved their family home so beautifully and kept it a living home. I ask Nicole what struck her most when she returned. She pauses, considers for a moment and says, “The smell. I always remember the smell of Due Santi.” Her mother, Gabriella, and her cousin Gustavo break into big smiles and agree. When I ask if the day has been bittersweet, Gabriella immediately says no. “You know, it was always a very international place, Due Santi; an Italian and an Australian. I married an American, as did Gustavo; there were the Otto Santi from other countries as well. We are all so, so happy that that the university came here and that it remains such a beautiful, international place.”
I wish Nicole a happy birthday and slip away at a respectable American time so these Italians can continue the party late into the evening. As I say goodnight, she tells me, “When I dream at night of home, I dream of Due Santi.”
Originally published in Due Santi and the University of Dallas: Un Piccolo Paradiso, edited by Roper and Andrew Moran, BA ’91 PhD ’04, this article has been abridged for space.
