To George Sturgis
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. Dec. 4, 1944
The value of the lira is now uncertain and erratic. A newspaper costs 1 lira or one cent, which is what a half-sheet of printing may be worth; but a good pair of boots costs 5000 lire, or $50, which is due to the scarcity of leather and the dislike of everybody to receive a depreciating currency in payment for substantial goods. The Mother General shares this dislike: and unless her $7000 are payable in dollars or pounds, as a draft would have been before the war, and she could deposit them as such in an international bank, they would not meet my indebtedness. It was because the dollars remained dollars in Chicago that she wished the money to be sent there, and not to Rome. When the drafts come I will telegraph to you to send me no more of them so long as they are payable only in lire, as I fear will prove to be the case. My debt to the Sisters will hang over, and I will keep the hundreds of thousands of lire for my running expenses until they are spent or lose their value altogether. I am afraid we have made a bad bargain.
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 M