In the historical archive of the University for Foreigners there is a document of enrollment in a language course in the name of Susan Elisabeth Rotolo. Everything starts from this University, known since its inception throughout the world for its prestigious Italian language courses. It was July 1962 and she was a pretty American student from New York who had arrived in Perugia to attend quarterly Italian courses at the University for Foreigners of Perugia. She frequented Palazzo Gallenga from 1 July to 7 September 1962. Susan Elisabeth called herself “Suze” and she was the girl who made Bob Dylan lose his mind to the point of writing him the lyrics of his most famous folk ballads of his career. he.
She was the daughter of Gioacchino Pietro Rotolo and Maria Pezzati di Piacenza, an anti-fascist activist who in the 1930s in Paris had been in charge of procuring false documents for exiled Italians. «She was still a very young self-confident girl of just 17 years old – tells us prof. Sabrina Cittadini of Unistrapg – and it all happened in a concert, where her older sister, Carla, passionate about folk music and scholar, invited Suze to one of Bob Dylan’s live shows. This was the context of a great love, of a stroke of lightning that would have made the young Dylan fall in love with him and introduce him into his world. In the world of art and literature.
«His artistic training – tells Cittadini – was fundamental for his personal growth. Suze billed herself as “Susanna Justine,” using a middle name invented to throw the FBI off. During her student years, she lived in a boarding house a few steps from the Gallenga palace, and later moved first to via Appia and then to corso Garibaldi. The love story between Suze and Dylan – continues Cittadini – was dotted with painful searches without positive results but the American folksinger never gave up and continued desperately to look for her. And according to some testimonies collected in Perugia, again from Cittadini it is said that ‘one evening in 1962, in Corso Garibaldi, a very young boy got out of a black taxi at number 104 with a bouquet of red roses. It was Bob Dylan and he had come from Rome to Perugia in vain to look for his Suze, our Susan Elisabeth Rotolo ‘».
