LIVING IN ITALY
75
conscientiously placed is a part of the peculiar affliction and, in
another sense, one of the privileges of the voluntary exile.
After the war, Italy came into a multitudinous rediscovery and
the old exiles who had been shut off from sight and correspondence
for a few years came forth too, as old women with their market
baskets appear after a siege. With Berenson, post-war prosperity
meant an unexpected sweetening of his public image. His posses–
sions, his worldliness, his aestheticism seemed in a frightened, in–
flationary world, at the least harmless and, at the best, admirably
eternal and shrewd. In the depression decade before the war, his
villa,
I Tatti,
with its splendid library, its pictures-its Sassetta and
Domenico Veneziano--might have been thought exorbitantly self–
centered. In 1950, the first thing I thought about it was that it was
not luxuriously beautiful, at least not as such places are abroad.
It
was not a
paradiso
for an interesting idler, but simply a passable
Italian villa, serviceable, comfortable, rather staid, with a good
many brownish sofas and draperies. True, it had its garden, its
dramatic cypresses and pieces of suitable sculpture, indeed every–
thing graceful and practical that might be expected; still it was
most memorable for its solidity, the somewhat Northern substan–
tiality, the thickness of stuffs and things, the reminders of the com–
fortable Beacon Street standards of Berenson's youth. And the
house seemed to ask that the occupants and guests conduct them–
selves in a discreet and plausible manner, keeping the spirit of
reasonable calm and well-polished utility. Politeness, adaptability,
the habits of social efficiency were strongly stated if not rigidly de–
manded; they were the firmness upon which a unique personal
history rested. A steady pace, familiar and satisfying, reigned
benevolently.
There was no Mediterranean slackness about Berenson, no
languor or sunstroke or tropical vegetation. On the receptive, hos–
pitable Italian soil, he built an orderly, conscience-driven life.
Heaters glowed in the library; curtains were drawn and brown
lamps turned on at dusk. At the fireside you might have been lis–
tening to the conversations of a character in Thomas Mann, one
of those highly individual scholars in
Doctor Faustus,
with their
