I WRITE this from the Collegio Ghislieri, in the ancient university town of Pavia. The college was founded in 1567, though the university itself is far older than that, as there is evidence of teaching there going back as early as 1361. I am here to deliver a lecture on Tolkien, and, as I explored the city this morning with Marco, the student who invited me, he was happy to point out a pair of narrow medieval towers, facing one another, and to tell me that student fans of The Lord of the Rings enjoyed referring to them in English borrowed from Tolkien’s title as the “Two Towers”.

Marco then disappeared into a library to prepare for an exam that he had just before my lecture, and left me to explore the city on my own.

It is some years since I visited Italy, and I had forgotten how good it was to be in one of its old towns, the narrow streets leading into beautiful café-lined piazzas, with their tables out in the sun and their effortlessly stylish clientele lingering over a morning cappuccino and a copy of the Corriere della Sera.

It all brought back vivid memories of a magical year when I was 16, and my father had a sabbatical in Rome. We lived in the Viale Aventino, and it was in that year that I acquired my taste for coffee, and also first drank and happily enjoyed a little vino, judiciously watered down by my parents, around the family table. There was always poetry in the air for me that year, as I visited the Keats-Shelley memorial house by the Spanish steps, the house in which Keats spent his last months and where he left this world.

It is my first visit, though, to Pavia; but the place also has poetic associations for me, as I first came across the name of Pavia in a medieval Latin poem, the Archpoet’s “Confession”. I had read Helen Waddell’s glorious translation of this poem while I was in the sixth form, but I took the opportunity, while I was at Cambridge, to do a course in medieval Latin and have a go, not very successfully, at translating the poem myself.

This anonymous 12th-century troubadour took the nickname Archpoet (Archipoeta), because he was, for a while, in the household of the Archbishop of Cologne, and, since he was serving an archbishop, why not style himself an archpoet? His famous poem the “Confessio”, with its glorious celebration of wine, women, and song, and its scathing satire on the pretensions of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, found its way into the Carmina Burana, which is where most people first meet it.

The Archpoet was one of the vagantes, “The Wandering Scholars”, as Waddell called them in her classic book of that name. The lifestyle of these troubadours is well set out in the “Confession” (Waddell’s translation):
 

Hither, thither, masterless
Ship upon the sea,
Wandering through the ways of air,
Go the birds like me.

And it is later in this poem that he celebrates Pavia for its beauties and its taverns:

Pavia, where Beauty draws
Youth with finger-tips,
Youth entangled in her eyes,
Ravished with her lips.

Well, I shall leave the beauties and ravishments to the youth of this student city; but I hope that, before I leave, as an elderly archpoet, to taste a little wine in a tavern, and prove the truth of the Archpoet’s assertion:

As the wine is, so the verse:
’Tis a better chorus
When the landlord hath a good
Vintage set before us.