Bill Berkson
Piero Della Francesca And His Followers

From Tether 1, page 29:

“Piero had no real followers; or else, we are his followers—the likes of us, the “Piero nuts,” initiates who follow his paint, his thought, the bits of pieces known of his life, and who thus follow what is called “the Piero Trail” north from Rome through Umbria and Tuscany, across the Marches to Rimini on the Adriatic, and further along, up the coast to Venice. Twenty years ago, an Umbrian friend told me that Italians think of “pieromania” as a strange sort of virus to which English and Americans (and, in more recent times, a few French poets, filmmakers, and theorists) are especially prone. Ambivalence notwithstanding, Italians do their part to promote the strain, and not just, I suspect, for specialists or the tourist trade.”