To Rosamond Thomas Bennett Sturgis
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. August 17, 1945

I owe you thanks for your letter of July 20, and for your last parcel, containing two most welcome jars of peach and apricot jam (one now already consumed!) in perfect condition, unopened, in their bed of wood-shavings. The new method of giving a list of the contents, with prices, works very well. Nothing any longer is missing, one learns how far one is sponging on one’s friends and relations, and (another improvement) the parcel is sometimes delivered at one’s residence for a fee of ten lire = ten cents. I blush to suggest any more things to send: if you can’t resist the spontaneous impulse send me more of the same; and tea and coffee are always welcome.

. . . Bob by this time has probably told you that on his way to Naplese spent a night or two in Rome, and was able to make me a flying visit, turning up one evening unexpectedly, and when he went away, before ten o’clock, having to get the gates and the front door unlocked for him, as if he were escaping from a moated castle. The worst of it may have been that he may have found no conveyance to his camp, and have had to walk five miles at night (and the roads romantically infested again by brigands) after a tiring and very hot day. Please ask him to write to me, if he hasn’t done so already, and tell me whether he is going to the East (or rather to the West from America) in spite of the peace, or whether he can now, after all, remain at home, and connect with his old life and his old friends. When I was a young man I should have seized any opportunity to see remote countries and peoples; but it ought to have been by wandering about alone, or with casual acquaintances, not under military discipline; and if Bob had a passion for travel or for architectural exploration, he could probably satisfy it now after he left the army better than by remaining in active service. But I daresay his mind is filled with other things, and I am glad to think that at last he will be free, while still young enough, to choose his own way. I was never free until I was nearly fifty.

Your affectionate,
Uncle George

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.