The
Santa Maddalena Foundation for Writers and Botanists was established to honor
the great novelist and memoirist Gregor von Rezzori. The Foundation’s
aim is to offer a retreat to writers and botanists that provides freedom and
tranquility for work. There are four resident Fellowships available during each
season of the year. The Foundation gives special consideration to writers of
fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and scripts - and writers engaged in works on the
natural world.Santa Maddalena lies outside the village of Donnini, half an hour
from Florence and within easy reach of Arezzo and Siena. The house is perched
above one of the great wooded ravines that slice through this part of Tuscany
and form a natural, protective barricade to development. In summertime, you
can make your way across the stone terrace of the house, past Gregor von Rezzori's
writing studio, along flower-covered walls and through quiet groves of oak and
chestnut trees above the swimming pool, to a signal tower that was built in
the times of Dante and Petrarca, the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.When the Rezzoris
discovered Santa Maddalena in 1967 it was more or less a ruin. Beatrice Monti
della Corte, who was the founder and for many years the director of the renowned
Galleria dell'Ariete in Milan, which introduced American pop artists such as
Jim Dine, Sam Francis and Rauschenberg to Europe, set about restoring the house
and the tower (the writer and traveler Bruce Chatwin described her as "having
a flair for putting fantasies into action"). The Rezzoris became known
for their hospitality; visiting writers - including Bruce Chatwin, Michael Ondaatje,
Tilman Spengler, Robert Hughes, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Bryan Robertson - found
Santa Maddalena an irresistible place to work, and tended to return to it again
and again. Gregor von Rezzori felt that his well being as a writer was made
possible by the roots he was finally able to put down in Santa Maddalena. And
though he often said that he was delighted his guests did not grow roots there
themselves, he was happy in the knowledge that they did become addicted to the
inspiring qualities of the place.Bruce Chatwin described his love for Santa Maddalena in many of his writings. An accomplished traveler, he often noted how a place can fulfill essential needs for writers, providing inspiration and often the means for dealing with a paralyzing case of writer's block. As Chatwin notes, this was as true for deskbound writers such as Flaubert, Tolstoy, Zola, and Proust, as it was for literary vagabonds like Melville,Hemingway, Gogol, and Dostoevsky, whose writing lives "were a headlong round of hotels and rented rooms-and, in the case of the last, a Siberian prison."
