Perhaps her claims to penury were exaggerated; there was, after all, enough money to travel to Italy for the next several summers, as well as time to spend there, thanks to the UN’s generous allowance of six weeks annual leave: “I went to Italy on the charter flight and came back with $10 which I always reserved. I came back usually on the Friday so that I’d have the weekend to recover from the flight before beginning work and getting my pent-up salary and I got a salary advance to go away too. And I would come back with this $10.” When she finally gathered the courage to leave the UN, she felt that it was a liberation: “I’d been trying to cope with this completely disillusioning bureaucratic life and pretending that it mattered in a way I didn’t believe.” Ever after she would say that “the real risk was to stay.” Her capacity to imagine a departure from, an alternative to, working at the UN had been formed by her experiences in this past year, in Italy, in the values and the joy she had learnt in Naples and in the north. Solaia embodied principles she had tried to accommodate in her life: “It is difficult to convey without solemnity the homage paid in that house to civilised greatness; and the presence, whether invoked or latent, of art and poetry.” The Vivantes made tangible to her not only these values but also something of her own worth: “It was there, and through them, that I was released into a larger life; restored to the measure of belief in myself that the United Nations had eroded.” She would look back to this time and its significance within the story of her life: “My idyllic ‘childhood,’ ‘lost domaine,’ or what takes its place was Solaia. Moments of realised perfection, dreamlike suspension of time and ‘complicity’ of Nature. Perhaps not comparable, because heightened by consciousness; as childhood might instead be boundless with innocence.” She was able, finally now, to inhabit the childhood she had always imagined for herself, to join, imaginatively at least, a family with elevated principles and sensibilities, to be recognised and welcomed by them, and to return from them to the larger world.