Un ordito toscano: La Foce e Villa Solaia negli scritti di Iris Origo e Arturo Vivante

[Machine translation] Part of the intense socialization activity that substantially contributed to the creation of transatlantic networks in post-war Italy took place outside the cities, in estates, villas and gardens, often restored and reshaped by an opulent Anglo-Italian-American intelligentsia. Around Siena, already in the years between the two wars, Elena de Bosis and Leone Vivante had opened their Villa Solaia to a group composed of artists that included Eugenio Montale, Irma Brandeis, Camillo Sbarbaro, Ruth Draper and Ezra Pound. Still in Siena, Iris Origo and her husband Antonio entertained guests such as Bernard Berenson, Ignazio Silone, Umberto Morra and Elsa Dallolio at their estate in Val d'Orcia — La Foce. , The Anglo-American passion for Italian, and specifically Tuscan, estates took on strong textual relevance in the decades following the world war, when villas and gardens appeared in autobiographical accounts and in works of fiction. This is the case of the writings of Iris Origo and Arturo Vivante, whose somewhat mirrored figures — she an Anglo-American who spent most of her life in Italy, he an Italian forced first to take refuge in England, then immigrated to the United States — are combined here on the basis of their common involvement with a series of protagonists of the Italian-American cultural and political life of the twentieth century and of the common emotional and creative investment in the Tuscan homes that were the setting for these meetings.