In August 2010 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York gave the Federico Zeri Foundation a copy of the original Federico Zeri correspondence kept at the American museum.
The 570 letters range from 1948 to 1988 and afford an extraordinary record of art history and collecting in the second half of the twentieth century.
Among his correspondents we find some of the leading Italian Renaissance scholars such as John Pope-Hennessy, Everett Fahy and Keith Christiansen, curators of the American museum; Elizabeth Gardner, who worked with Zeri to draw up catalogues of Italian painting, and past Metropolitan directors like Theodore Rousseau, James J. Rorimer, Thomas P.F. Hoving, Philippe de Montebello.
The special importance of the correspondence is that it documents, diary-like, the scholar's relations with the museum. These stepped up in the late Fifties when Zeri was appointed to curate the catalogue of Italian paintings kept in the Department of European Paintings. The 4-volume catalogue would be published between 1971 and 1986.