“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.
A former gallerist and devoted patron of the arts, Monti della Corte began hosting writers in 2000, two years after the death of her husband, the novelist Gregor “Grisha” von Rezzori. For three weeks at a time, two or three writers roam the farmhouse, from the entrance hall, where an Antoni Tàpies painting hangs, to the swimming pool outside.
Santa Maddalena’s guest list reads like a modern literary canon. Michael Cunningham, Michael Ondaatje, Sally Rooney, Zadie Smith, Colm Tóibín, Olga Tokarczuk, and Edmund White have all come here to write, breaking bread over Tuscan dishes with fresh-pressed olive oil.
This September, in the adjacent woods, Monti della Corte is unveiling a two-story library opposite the property. From afar, it is camouflaged by green walls and stone accents. The interiors, which echo the surrounding forest, are an homage to trees and to paper, the writer’s medium. “It’s meant to resemble an island in the forest,” says the library’s director, Pablo Maurette.
The library has been decades in the making. Shortly after the foundation opened, the modernist architect Marco Zanuso, a friend of Monti della Corte’s, drew up initial plans, but they were shelved. The concept returned over the last decade “as a kind of fantasy,” Maurette says. A collaboration with architect Pietro Cicognani produced the current design, which blends seamlessly into the woods. Monti della Corte, who turned 99 this year, calls it “the last project of her life.” The library will house the archives of all Santa Maddalena writers (books and correspondence) as well as materials related to the Gregor von Rezzori Prize, which was recently awarded to J. M. Coetzee and Annie Ernaux.
“The foundation is now 25 years old,” Maurette tells me, “and in that time nearly 250 writers have stayed and worked here. We have books from all of them.”
Starting this fall, the space will also host conferences, conversations, poetry readings, and events for translators and publishers. Maurette will oversee four or five major public events a year, opening “the Tower” to a wider world.
The library has already attracted a notable crowd. At a June unveiling, Tóibín and Karin Altenberg mingled with Cunningham and Andrew Sean Greer over glasses of Tuscan wine. It promises to become a pilgrimage site for writers across Italy and beyond. At the party, Monti della Corte, almost a centenarian, looked on.
As White wrote of her: “She is the golden spider in the midst of a vast, fluttering web of memories.”
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at AIR MAIL
