Art historian Bernard Berenson (1865–1959) at Villa I Tatti
An amusing story used to circulate in Florence in the late summer of 1944, a few months before the Allied armies of General Clark pushed the Germans northwards to ultimate defeat. Bernard Berenson, who had been in hiding for over a year, was finally able to walk again along the picturesque country lanes of Settignano that he knew and loved so well. On the first day out, a United States Army vehicle stopped alongside the diminutive, bearded, and impeccably attired gentleman. A G.I. leaned out and, in dreadful pidgin Italian, asked for directions. Mr. Berenson obliged, but naturally in the subtly nuanced and inflected phrases for which his English was famous. Stunned, the G.I. asked: “Hey, buddy, are you American?” When Berenson politely confirmed that he was, the soldier could hardly believe it—“Then what’ you doin’ in a dump like this?”
Whether apocryphal or not, the vignette perfectly captures the sense of the jarring encounter between the supremely cultivated Jamesian savant—then almost eighty years old—and a visitor appearing, as if from a distant planet. By the end of the war, the world with which Bernard Berenson identified was rapidly disappearing. By the time he died in 1959, at the age of ninety-four, he was regarded as a precious relic, a surviving curiosity. Such a vivid sense of temporal dislocation is not uncommon to people whom providence allows a life that extends two decades beyond the
