At the Villa Borago

It is autumn 1962 and Jess Ensworth, twenty-three, of Memphis, Tennessee, is spending five weeks at a pensione high in the hills overlooking Florence. Her traveling companion/chaperone is her beloved uncle. The opening scene of AT THE VILLA BORAGO, which is set in both Florence and Tennessee, gives a tip of the hat to E.M Forster's A ROOM WITH A VIEW, but then the story takes flight as something completely new. The love story at the heart of AT THE VILLA BORAGO finds its trajectory as the closely guarded conformities and moral presumptions of the 1950s begin to yield to the insistence on liberation of the '60s. Jess is intelligent and intrepid, an emerging artist determined to learn what life and love can be, poised between the era in which she was raised and a brave new world in which she is determined to make her place. Indeed, each of the characters here is aware that his or her life is being shaped by seismic shifts of social context, but none of them is willing to allow the vagaries of chronology to have the final word in defining who they are or who they can become.