Word: caetani
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...days), they vie for invitations to her home, a gloomy Renaissance palazzo with an irresistibly highbrow address: 32 Via delle Botteghe Oscure (Street of the Dark Shops). There they get fruit juice and cakes, plenty of rarefied talk about writers and writing, and lots of sympathy. The Princess Marguerite Caetani's interest in their work is as genuine as her 800-year-old title, and what is more, she backs it with money...
...Princess Caetani (nee Marguerite Chapin of New London, Conn.) gets 500 or so manuscripts a year, and scrupulously goes through them all. Those writers lucky enough to please her fancy will see their stuff in Botteghe Oscure, a fat, cream-colored semiannual collection of writing that prints contributions in French, Italian and English. A writer who is known to be well-to-do may get very little for a fine long story. A poor poet may be paid beyond his wildest hopes for a brief poem...
...world has paid scant attention to the princess and her highbrow Botteghe. U.S. circulation is under 2,000, much less in other countries, and even the rich princess has had to sell some of her paintings to keep it going. But Marguerite Caetani is an old hand at backing forlorn literary causes. For ten years she ran France's distinguished quarterly Commerce, and her home in Paris, like the palace in Rome, was a gathering place for writers. Her distant cousin, T. S. Eliot, warned her not to start Botteghe, told her it was tough enough to back...
...Princess Caetani refuses to talk about quitting, hopes that a sudden spurt in circulation will save the magazine and let her keep her paintings. Certainly, the more creative U.S. highbrows would regard the death of Botteghe as a calamity. In the U.S., the literary quarterlies have become forums for academicians whose most congenial task is to criticize each other's criticism. Young writers and un conventional writers have never had too many places where they could turn, have fewer than ever today...
...week were opened by Countess di Frasso with a dinner and dance at the Whip Club, which steamed along until 7 in the morning. The guests, as one of them put it, were "not only the cream of Roman society, but the cream of the cream." There was Vittoria Caetani, Dowager Duchess of Sermoneta, ex-lady in waiting to the ex-Queen of Italy. Her latest book, Sparkle Distant Worlds, is quite sad: "Now we began hearing of the first horrors of war, Poland invaded . . . a British passenger steamer sunk off the Hebrides . . . My last footman was called...