Uli and Italy went back a long way. Her first visits there must have been made on trips with her family. Later, from August 1989 she began going to Rome for three summers to take language classes on her own. She shared apartments with other students close to Via Nazionale, near her language school, but didn’t find the area ideal.
When she returned to Rome in 1993-94 to study on an exchange program, she chose to live in Trastevere near the Piazza di San Cosimato, outside the flow of tourists. Uli recalled Trastevere with fondness; one of her favorite squares there was the Piazza di Santa Maria.
In 1999-2003 she returned to Italy to study for her PhD in economics at the European University Institute, located in the hills above Florence, in San Domenico. In later years, she would send photos of the institute’s garden. The garden is thought to be near the site where in the mid-1300s Boccaccio took refuge from the plague in Florence and wrote the Decameron. Uli loved that book, so for her the garden held a special charm. Even today, the area feels like an oasis from the city.
The EUI, where Uli studied, is one of Europe’s top research bodies in social science, grounded in the humanism associated with the Florentine Renaissance and Ancient Greece. The 1990s/early 2000s were a time of great progress for the EU; there was a widespread sense of the common purpose of European nations, and Uli believed keenly in that.
Her graduation ceremony was held in the nearby church, Badia Fiesolana. Down the road is the Church of San Domenico, with an altarpiece by Fra Angelico, one of her favorite artists. A short walk uphill is Fiesole, another area that she knew well, with Etruscan and Roman remains. One of Uli’s most enjoyable hikes took her from Fiesole to Settignano along a path with panoramic views of Florence.
Uli did much traveling elsewhere in Tuscany and beyond, exploring towns, villas, churches and art. In later years she would write, “I still like a lot the Italians from 1200s/1300s like Duccio and Giotto and also Italian early Renaissance from 1400s . . . . I still enjoy looking at Botticelli originals and other 1400s Italian artists, Piero della Francesca, Perugino, etc. etc. and I really love the Annunciations by Fra Angelico.” In one of the trips she mentioned, she crossed Sicily by bus with a friend. In another, she attended an opera performance in the Roman amphitheater at Verona.
Years later, while she was in Chile, she decided that after returning to Brussels she wanted to do more traveling in Europe, Italy in particular. In February 2024, once the pandemic had subsided, she was finally able to revisit and sent photos of her trip. She wrote, “Florence hasn’t changed a lot . . . . I loved the medieval duomos in Parma and Modena and the medieval Antelami sculptures in Parma’s battisterio and a Renaissance villa in Ferrara . . . . After quite some time, it has been splendid to come back to Italy.”
