I Tatti, the History of a House

I Tatti, the History of a House traces the architectural evolution of Villa I Tatti in Florence from its early origins around the year 1000 through the 1930s, when Bernard and Mary Berenson redesigned the estate and transformed it into an epicenter for the promotion of Italian Renaissance art to the Anglophone world. This book captures a web of local and international intersecting stories that follow the villa’s medieval, Renaissance, and eighteenth-century life as a Florentine residence and explores its place in the ex-pat world of nineteenth-century Florence. The Berensons’ renovations are also documented, their creation of a rarefied environment of aesthetic debate and intellectual discovery not unlike those cultivated in Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Bloomsbury circle or in the Steins’ rue de Fleurus. I Tatti is a history of a house, its life, and the people around it in the longue durée—a portrait of the city and Tuscan countryside that includes actors whose names are not celebrated in history, but whose lives recovered here offer a vivid image of changing habits and mores as well as attitudes to property and to the land that no history book records.