To Richard Colton Lyon
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. July 9, 1948
California, where I spent my last summer in America in 1911, seemed to me in its atmosphere and spirit more like Southern Europe than like the rest of the United States; but it is true that I have never been south of Washington and Baltimore. No doubt, in the way of business, life is as tight in California as in the rest of the country, and what I saw at Berkeley, in the Summer School, was business; but I moved as soon as I could to the University Club in San Francisco, and dined every evening in Italian restaurants in what they called the Barbary Coast, after walking in the Park among the eucalyptus groves: and people too seemed to me more easy-going and happy than in New England.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Eight, 1948-1952. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.