Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies is a center for advanced research in the humanities located in Florence, Italy, and belongs to Harvard University. It houses a collection of Italian primitives, and of Chinese and Islamic art, as well as a research library of 140,000 volumes and a collection of 250,000 photographs. It is the site of Italian and English gardens. Villa I Tatti is located on an estate of olive groves, vineyards, and gardens on the border of Florence, Fiesole and Settignano.

While guided tours of the gardens are offered, Villa I Tatti itself is not generally open to the public.

For almost sixty years Villa I Tatti was the home of Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), the connoisseur whose attributions of early Italian Renaissance painting guided scholarship and collecting in this field for the first half of the twentieth century.

The property originated as a seventeenth-century farmhouse given to the expatriate English John Temple Leader in 1854 after being owned by multiple Italian families. In 1900, Bernard Berenson married Mary Whitall Pearsall Smith, who had formerly been married to the British politician Frank Costelloe. Mary came from a liberal Quaker family from Philadelphia, and had two daughters from her previous marriage, but the marriage to Berenson remained childless. The couple moved to I Tatti shortly before their marriage, first renting the property from Temple Leader, and about 1907 buying it outright from Temple Leader's heir, the 3rd Baron Westbury. Under Mary Berenson's supervision, the property was transformed into a Renaissance-style villa with the assistance of the English architect and writer Geoffrey Scott, while a formal garden in the Anglo-Italian Renaissance style was laid out by the English landscape architect Cecil Pinsent. This work was completed in 1915.

Mary and Bernard Berenson envisaged Villa I Tatti as a "lay monastery" for the leisurely study of Mediterranean culture through its art. Bernard was against academic production, specialization, degrees, and what are now called in the Italian academic world "titoli", and instead prized the slow maturing of ideas in tranquil contemplation. He considered his own achievement to lie as much in conversation as in writing.

Berenson died at the age of 94 in 1959 after bequeathing the estate, the collection, and the library to Harvard University. "Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies", as it was officially named, opened its doors to six fellows in 1961. Since then it has welcomed over 700 fellows and visiting scholars from the United States and Canada, Japan, Australia, and almost all of the European countries.

Berenson's esteem for Harvard dated from his youth. He arrived in Boston at age ten as a poor Jewish immigrant from Lithuania. His brilliance was soon recognized and, after finishing the Boston Latin School and completing a year at Boston University, he was supported through Harvard College by wealthier members of Boston society, graduating with the class of 1887. His interests there were in literature and ancient and oriental languages. He trained himself as a connoisseur of early Italian painting by travel throughout Europe and especially Italy, beginning in 1887. As early as 1915, he expressed his intention to leave his house and library to Harvard, and he reaffirmed his intention in 1937, in a letter published in the fiftieth-anniversary volume of his Harvard class. However, Fascism, war, and post-war travail in Italy led Harvard to hesitate, and the bequest was only formally accepted by the Harvard Corporation at the time of Berenson's death in 1959, opening its doors to the first class of fellows in 1961.

The garden was created beginning in 1909 by the then young and inexperienced garden designer Cecil Pinsent. Pinsent had been touring Tuscany making topographic drawings of buildings together with his friend Geoffrey Scott. They were both hired to work on I Tatti through Scott's connection with Berenson's wife, Mary (Scott was hired as Bernard Berenson's personal secretary between 1907 and 1909). I Tatti was to become a formidable test, through which Pinsent could become a recognized specialist of the formal garden. When the Berensons had acquired the estate five years prior, the property was desolate. Erika Neubauer considers I Tatti "possibly [Pinsent's] most important garden layout".