The Visitor Edward Hopper Received Two Years Before His Death Fifteen years ago I moved from my native Rome to this small town embedded on a hill called Anticoli Corrado. I left Rome not in search of a calmer life but because the daily contrast with the greats of the past pained me. Accepting one's own mediocrity does not mean having to see it reaffirmed at every step one takes, we can agree on that. Another factor was that living in Rome was very expensive for a man like me, not exactly poor but of limited means. How would I describe Anticoli Corrado? Let's see . . . Some hundred kilometers, more or less, from Rome, it's a tiny place with less than a thousand inhabitants, a lovely little eleventh-century church, and a square at whose center stands a fountain sculpted by Arturo Martini. For the few tourists, it's one of those weekend excursions when one wishes to breathe fresh air and enjoy a rustic lunch with bucolic vistas. In the nineteenth century, Roman artists would come to Anticoli Corrado to seek out young women with healthy-looking features and shapes who were saints in their paintings and whores in bed. Add to that the fact of dozens of nonentities of painting having chosen the village to live in, and its fame as "the city of art and models" is justified—an additional attraction for the visitors who, after wasting time in the art museum next to my home, rush to their country-style meal.