“I have tried to write in such places as an African mud hut (with a wet towel tied on my head), an Athonite monastery, a writers’ colony, a moorland cottage, even a tent,” the author Bruce Chatwin wrote. “But whenever the dust storms come, the rainy season sets in, or a pneumatic drill destroys all hope of concentration, I curse myself and ask: What am I doing here? Why am I not at the Tower?”
He was referring to a watchtower at Santa Maddalena, a writers’ retreat nestled among the orchard slopes of Tuscany, just a one-hour drive from Florence. The retreat takes its name from a 16th-century farmhouse called Santa Maddalena, acquired by Beatrice Monti della Corte in the 1960s.
