I Tatti was Bernard Berenson’s home, art-filled villa, and gathering place overlooking Florence. During a European visit, Harry S. Truman, Bess Wallace Truman, and the Woodwards lunched there for two hours with Berenson, then nearly ninety-one. The visit brought a former American president into a setting associated with Renaissance art and an international literary and theatrical circle; it also left a record of mutual admiration, with Truman praising Berenson’s intelligence and conversation and Berenson describing Truman as approachable and unspoiled by high office.

The Villa and Its Host

Berenson had made I Tatti his home before the First World War, when Truman was still living on a farm. The villa was more than a residence: it was described as a shrine and institution, with incomparable paintings and sculpture, a library of 55,000 volumes, and a view over Florence. Its abundance of art and books made the house an expression of Berenson’s long-established authority and taste, rather than simply a backdrop for a social visit.

Born a Lithuanian Jew and educated at Harvard, Berenson had become a leading authority on Italian Renaissance art. Widely regarded as the consummate connoisseur and “the world’s last great aesthete,” he was, at the time of Truman’s visit, tiny and frail in appearance, with a white beard, but still vital and talkative. The contrast between his slight, nearly ninety-one-year-old presence and his continuing intellectual energy is part of the account’s portrait of I Tatti: the villa’s reputation rested not only on its collection, but on the animated conversation of the man who presided over it.

A Gathering Place for Conversation

I Tatti drew celebrated visitors from literature and theater, among them J. B. Priestley, Robert Lowell, Alberto Moravia, Laurence Olivier, and Mary McCarthy. They came to hear Berenson, who customarily did most of the talking, and to be able to say they had known him. The house therefore operated as a social and intellectual meeting place, its distinguished visitors gathering around a host whose reputation extended well beyond the study of Renaissance art.

Truman’s lunch there belonged to that pattern, but the visit also had a particular quality. He later explained to Merle Miller that the party had simply gone to see Berenson because “He was the best in his line.” In his diary, Truman found him “clear headed and mentally alert as a man of 35 or 40.” The judgment captures Truman’s surprise at the older man’s undiminished sharpness; it also shows that the encounter was not merely a ceremonial stop at a famous villa. Truman was stimulated by Berenson’s company and his pleasure in conversation, recalling the appeal of earlier Sunday afternoon teas with Louis D. Brandeis.

Their talk moved beyond art to world affairs and the causes of the First World War, including the Austrian prime minister, the situation in Serbia, and the reasoning behind the Austrian ultimatum that began the conflict. Berenson offered a concise, bleak observation about diplomacy, calling its modern condition “Open insults openly arrived at.” Truman later remembered the remark as one that struck him forcibly. In a postscript to a letter recalling the visit, he wished that those in power would listen, think, and mock at things as Berenson had. I Tatti thus became the setting for an exchange in which its host’s historical and political reflections mattered alongside his reputation as an art connoisseur.

Truman at I Tatti

The account makes the lunch memorable not only for its setting but for Berenson’s response to his guests. He recorded that Harry and Bess arrived at one and stayed until three, and that both seemed as natural and unspoiled by high office as if Truman had gone no further than alderman of Independence, Missouri. Berenson felt “instantly at home” with Truman, who spoke openly and easily and was willing to discuss personal matters as well as other subjects. His impression was of a man whose manner crossed the distance usually imposed by presidential rank.

Berenson extended that judgment beyond the personal encounter. Truman’s straightforwardness reassured him about America at a time when, as he wrote, he had felt less assured. He even suggested that if “the Truman miracle” could still occur, there was no need to fear the McCarthys. His account also noted that Truman captivated Willy Mostyn-Owen, a young, sharply critical Englishman disposed to condescend to Americans. The praise gives I Tatti a significance beyond a distinguished luncheon: within Berenson’s own diary, the villa became the scene in which Truman’s ease with individuals was presented as a counterweight to political mistrust and anti-American skepticism.

The meeting’s two accounts emphasize different but complementary qualities. Truman remembered Berenson’s alert mind and the force of his comment on diplomacy; Berenson remembered Truman’s candor, naturalness, and capacity to put others at ease. The villa’s art collection and library supplied the setting, but conversation gave the visit its shape. At I Tatti, the former president was not presented through the machinery of office or public ceremony. He was a guest at a long lunch, talking with an elderly scholar whose home had gathered generations of cultural prestige around a table.