Villa Lena is officially an arts foundation and unofficially the most interesting dinner table in Italy. Roughly half the guests, on any given week, are painters, writers, and choreographers in residence; the other half are people who have paid to sit near them.
This should be insufferable. It is not. Everyone eats at long tables. Everyone drinks the same wine. The choreographer sitting next to me on Tuesday night was, it turned out, my father's neighbour in Rome in 1974. This is what you pay for.
