To Mary Williams Winslow
Florence, Italy. December 31, 1912
Thank you very much for the pretty calendar with its kind message. It has found me still here—though rather restive—retained by my friends, Strong and his daughter, Loeser and his wife, the Berensons, etc, but driven on by the bad weather. London couldn’t be more wet and foggy—and by a certain dislike I have taken to the place and to the life of the aesthetical colony in it. Rome is far more to my taste—larger, nobler, more genuinely alive, and more appealing to wide reflection. In Florence it is rather the quaint, incidental, and hopelessly archaic that people feed their imagination upon. The landlord of my hotel complains that the stream of tourists has dwindled, and that people who came to spend the winter in Florence now go to Cairo instead. I can perfectly sympathize with this change of fashion, and though I am too lazy and fond of solitude to go to Egypt with the smart rabble, I am going for a while to the Riviera, to catch a glimpse of the sun and sea, on my way to Andalusia and thence to Madrid.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.