The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies Villa I Tatti Via di Vincigliata 26, 50135 Florence, Italy Volume 21 —,m— E-mail:
[email protected] 2001 Telephone: +39-055-603-251 / Fax: +39-055-603-383 his year’s “Letter from Florence” tural plans for this have long since been Tcomes, in fact, not from Florence Letter From Florence drawn, and a considerable part of the at all. Unexpectedly, I am writing it P money has been raised, yet until yester- from Manhattan, on a steamy August day we have been stymied by the morning in a room high over refractory Fiesolan bureau- the East River. As I look in cracy. It has been ten years the direction of Montauk, Italy now since we first applied for is an indiscernible speck on an permits to replace the indeterminable horizon, hid- unsightly row of shabby den by the curvature of the garages at the back of the earth. Yet uncannily, I Tatti parking lot with a handsome itself is very much present in new building, essentially the this room. I’ve been spending same size and in the same every morning in e-mail com- footprint, which will provide munication with members of an office for each Fellow and a the staff, working on acade- room for small lectures or mic, budgetary, and other seminars. What should have matters, and I’ve been confer- been a simple matter was ring regularly with Charles transformed into a Kafkaesque Brickbauer, our devoted archi- labyrinth by interminable tect, about current and future Walter Kaiser and Allen Grieco delays, tergiversations, equivo- building renovations.