Artist: Steve Ziger

All the watercolours and pencil sketches on this Oral History site were painted by Steve Ziger when visiting I Tatti. Steve is the Design Principal for the Baltimore-based architectural firm Ziger/Snead Architects which he co-founded with Jamie Snead in 1984. Steve was most generous in allowing us to choose from his watercolours and sketches and we are delighted with the way they enhance the pages.

Oral History Editor: Anna Bensted

Anna worked from 1982 till 1997 for BBC radio and from 1997 till 2011 for WBUR, the National Public Radio station in Boston. She is currently the Manager for Community Engagement at Villa I Tatti.

Web Producer and Editor: Scott Palmer

Scott has a Ph.D. in American Literature and worked at I Tatti between 2005 and 2013. He is currently a faculty administrator at Villa La Pietra, New York University Florence, where he serves as the Coordinator of Instructional Technology and Digital Initiatives. 

Associate Web Producer:  Sabina D’Anna

Sabina holds a degree from L'Università degli studi di Napoli L’Orientale where she majored in Foreign Languages and Literature with a concentration in multimedia management and humanities computing in the arts, theater and cinema. She has additional training in web content editing and social media.

Assistant Producers

The very capable interns at VIT who helped with this Oral History:

Dominic Ferrante is a junior at Harvard College concentrating in History and Literature and a resident of Eliot House. His studies focus on the Italian Renaissance, particularly the art and literature of Florentine provenance. Dominic began assisting with the I Tatti Oral History Project during his internship at the Villa in 2012. He also made contributions while working at the Biblioteca Berenson in 2013. Dominic intends to pursue a PhD in the History of Art and hopes to one day work in museums as well as in academia.

Kaori Freda attends Reed College but in the spring of 2013 she was on the Study Abroad Program of Sarah Lawrence. Studio arts are her great passion, but while in Florence she also taught English to first graders at a local school and helped out at a contemporary art gallery in town.

Fabio Tononi studied at the Università degli Studi di Parma (2004-2010), with Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, where he earned a Bachelor's Degree in Art with a thesis on Ernesto Treccani. He continued his studies at the Università degli Studi di Firenze (2010-2013), with Maria Grazia Messina, where he earned a Master's Degree in Art History with a thesis on Fabio Mauri. He studied drawing at the Scuola Libera del Nudo Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze (2008-2012). He currently lives in London, where he is dealing with the artistic tendency known as Institutional Critique.

 

And grateful thanks

Anna would like to thank George Hicks from WBUR in Boston who was the talent behind their co-productions at WBUR, and of great assistance in helping Anna adjust to the digital age of recording and editing –once she had left WBUR!  Thanks as well to Mara Zepeda who, by some wonderful whim of fate, accompanied her husband Andrew Berns to I Tatti for the academic year 2012-13. Mara has worked as a reporter for NPR and in a much earlier life worked with Anna on productions from Boston. Many thanks also to Mary Gibbons Landor. Not only is Mary a stalwart supporter of I Tatti but she and her husband John recorded many hours of interview with Luisa Vertova on a cassette recorder. Mary very kindly packed those cassettes up and made sure they got sent to the Villa for the archive.

Grateful thanks as well to Ilaria Della Monica who has been as resourceful and energetic as ever in finding archive material, particularly photographs, for this project and to Giovanni Pagliarulo for his ready help with the timeline for the Villa.  Also to Juliet Stachan for the translation from the Italian.

And last but not least, ‘molte grazie’ to  Gianni Martilli and Gianni Trambusti who unfailingly respond with patience, kindness and good ideas when Anna calls up with yet another question about what has gone wrong with her computer.