Archibald MacLeish

Archibald MacLeish first travelled to Europe during the First World War, to fight for the American army. In the early 1920s he moved with his wife to France, and in 1924 he visited Italy, staying in Ventimiglia, Genoa, Pisa and Florence. In Paris, he devoted himself to the study of Italian to read Dante - while still a boy, his mother read him a translation of Inferno. He also joined the community of literary émigrés that attracted artists such as Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, and met Marguerite Caetani: both frequented the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Rue de l'Odéon, a meeting place for American and European expatriates. Their shared interests led him to become a contributor to Commerce, the first magazine founded by Caetani. After World War II, MacLeish was one of the most trusted contributors to the English-speaking section of Botteghe Oscure, the second publishing venture of the Princess of Bassiano.

Back to the United States, he worked for Henry Luce's magazine Fortune from 1929 to 1938. In 1939, President Roosevelt appointed him Librarian of Congress, effectively admitting him into the inner circle of his collaborators. Subsequently, he was put in charge of the first war propaganda organisation, the Office of Facts and Figures (later renamed the Office of War Information), collaborated with William Phillips on the War's Toll of Italian Art exhibition in 1944, aimed at the restoration and recovery of some of the Italian architectural works damaged during the war, and was finally elected American delegate to the first UNESCO conference in 1946.

Winner of the Prix de Rome, in 1957 MacLeish spent a period in Rome with his wife Ada at the American Academy, a stay interspersed with occasional trips to Greece and around Italy - he was a guest of Caetani in both Rome and Ninfa, and visited Ezra Pound's daughter Mary de Rachewiltz in Sirmione, while working to obtain Pound's release from the St. Elizabeth's criminal asylum in Washington, where the poet had been held since 1945 (he would be released the following year, in 1958).

When Caetani founded the new magazine Botteghe Oscure in Rome, MacLeish became its supporter and contributor. He published on its pages the poems "This Music Crept by Me upon the Waters" (1953) and "A View of the Lime Quarry" (1958), and the introductory essay to Quaderno XX "Reader to Readers: a Parenthesis" (1957). A great friend of Caetani's, whom he admired for his energy and determination, he tried to help promote the magazine overseas: around 1956 the princess asked him to persuade USIS and have its libraries subscribe to Botteghe Oscure. Despite MacLeish's efforts and Caetani's commitment, this did not happen and the publication of Botteghe Oscure ceased. In the autumn of 1960, MacLeish published the article 'Requiem for a Literary Haven' for the Saturday Review, in which he announced the last issue of the magazine and offered a reflection on what it had meant.

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