Historical Archives

The archive of the Berenson Library contains Bernard and Mary Berenson's published and unpublished manuscripts, notes, diaries, offprints of articles, biographical material, and personal photographs, as well as a large collection of letters written to the Berensons and a smaller collection of letters, copies or originals, written by Berenson, Mary, and Nicky Mariano.

Over the years the archive has grown through donations or acquisitions of other collections. It now includes papers of Giorgio Castelfranco, Kenneth Clark, Maud Cruttwell, Andrea Francalanci, Frederick Hartt, Giuseppe Marchini, Emilio Marcucci, Roberto and Livia Papini, Valeria Piacentini, Laurance P. and Isabel M. Roberts, Nicolaj Rubenstein, Craig H. Smyth, Stanislaus Eric Stenbock, and the Whitall-Smith family, as well as extensive materials of the Committee to Rescue Italian Art (CRIA), created after the 1966 flood and headquartered at I Tatti. Electronic finding-aids are currently available in HOLLIS for Archival Discovery for papers relating to the following:

• Bernard and Mary Berenson
• Giorgio Castelfranco
• Kenneth Clark
• Frederick Hartt
• Charles Loeser
• William Mostyn-Owen
• Roberto Papini
• Laurance P. and Isabel S. Roberts
• Stanislaus Eric Stenbock
• Whitall-Smith Family.

The archive also contains material relating to the Florentine flood of 1966, including papers from:

• Eve Borsook
• Committee to Rescue Italian Art (CRIA).

Printed finding-aids are available within the library for most of the other collections.

Requests to consult manuscript collections should be made to the archivist via this form.