Villa I Tatti

Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies is a center for advanced research in the humanities located in Florence, Italy, and belongs to Harvard University. It also houses a library and an art collection, and it is the site of Italian and English gardens. Villa I Tatti is located on an estate of olive groves, vineyards, and gardens on the border of Florence, Fiesole and Settignano.

Villa I Tatti is not open to the general public.

For almost sixty years Villa I Tatti was the home of Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), the connoisseur whose attributions of early Italian Renaissance painting guided scholarship and collecting in this field for the first half of the twentieth century. It houses the Berenson collection of Italian primitives, and of Chinese and Islamic art, as well as a research library of 140,000 volumes and a collection of 250,000 photographs.

In 1900 Bernard Berenson married Mary Whitall Pearsall Smith, who had formerly been married to the British politician, Frank Costelloe. Mary Berenson came from a liberal Quaker family from Philadelphia, and had two daughters from her previous marriage, but the marriage to Berenson remained childless. The couple moved to I Tatti shortly before their marriage, first renting the property from the expatriate English aristocrat, John Temple Leader, and then in 1907 buying it outright from Temple Leader’s heir, Lord Westbury. Between 1907 and 1915 the seventeenth-century farmhouse became a Renaissance-style villa under the direction of the English architect and writer Geoffrey Scott, while a formal garden in the Anglo-Italian Renaissance style was laid out by the English landscape architect Cecil Pinsent.

Berenson envisaged Villa I Tatti as a “lay monastery” for the leisurely study of Mediterranean culture through its art. He was against academic production, specialization, degrees, and what are now called in the Italian academic world “titoli,” and instead prized the slow maturing of ideas in tranquil contemplation. He considered his own achievement to lie as much in conversation as in writing.

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