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Jay Parini owes his friendship with Gore Vidal to a stranger’s hospitality. Planning a sabbatical for the spring of 1986, Parini mentioned to then Italian Professor Ugo Skubikowski that he wanted to spend the time in Italy cultivating his ethnic roots.

As it happened, Skubikowski’s mother had a friend with an empty house on the Amalfi coast, and she was delighted to rent it to Parini and his young family.

Soon after they arrived, Parini learned that the villa perched on the cliffs above their terrace belonged to Gore Vidal, whose work he’d long admired.

So he jotted a quick note: Dear Mr. Vidal, he recalls writing. I’m a college professor, a poet, a novelist, and a critic, and I’ll be living at this address for the next six months. If you ever have the time, I’d love to meet you.

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He then gave the note to a local tobacconist, who saw Vidal most afternoons when the writer stopped in for a newspaper. “It was a message in a bottle,” says Parini. “I had no idea what would happen