tiganeasca
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I just discovered this interesting little piece in the NYT of December 16, 2023:
"A Tuscan Retreat Where ‘Literature is the Primary Value’"
From her idyllic estate, Beatrice Monti della Corte oversees a writer’s residency that has provided inspiration, camaraderie, and leisurely, wine-fueled meals to some of the foremost storytellers of our time.
By Laura Rysman
Dec. 16, 2023
If the baronessa Beatrice Monti della Corte has found a secret to life, it is stories.
At the Santa Maddalena writer’s residency at her rambling estate in rural Tuscany, Monti has hosted some of the foremost storytellers of our time — Zadie Smith, Michael Cunningham, Colm Tóibín, Teju Cole, Sally Rooney, Olga Tokarczuk, Michael Ondaatje, Edmund White, and a couple hundred others. While authors appreciate her hushed writing rooms with olive grove vistas, her company is the principal draw.
“The only things Beatrice won’t talk about,” Smith said, “are things that are boring.”
At 97, Monti is animated and unstoppable. She runs Santa Maddalena as her personal passion project, accepting no applications and choosing writers according to her instincts, in consultation with her network of friends, publishers and other authors. Her taste, developed over a lifetime of nurturing and being nurtured by literature and art, is considered a bellwether, with several fellows going on to win the Nobel, the Pulitzer, the Booker, the Prix Goncourt.
Pablo Maurette, an Argentine author, at work.
At Santa Maddalena, “literature is the primary value,” said Cunningham, an annual visitor for two decades. “There are times when I swear that enough significant work has been done in those rooms that they’re imbued with something, the way smoke will eventually inhabit the walls of a place.”
Nestled among the orchard slopes beyond Florence, Santa Maddalena appears like a quintessential Tuscan idyll: an ivy-cloaked farmhouse from the 1500s, a medieval stone watchtower, a swimming pool in the garden. But it’s also a worldly enclave: The pool is where the actor Ralph Fiennes, a friend of Monti’s since filming “The English Patient” nearby, likes to sunbathe in the summer; the tower is where the writer Bruce Chatwin would spend months working on his books between travels; the farmhouse — cleared by Monti of occupying chickens — was remodeled with the Modernist architect Marco Zanuso.
“I’d never seen anything so beautiful in my life,” Smith said of her initial visit to the estate — a quiet escape from the cyclone of fame following her publication of “White Teeth.” “I was such a parochial person. Part of Santa Maddalena was understanding that Willesden is not the center of the world,” she said of the suburb in northwest London.
In addition to being a retreat for writers, Santa Maddalena is also home to art collected by Monti over the course of her life — including, here, a portrait of her and portraits of her husband’s ancestors.
After her stay, Smith relocated to Rome for two years, learned Italian and even adopted a pug identical to the dog faithfully found by Monti’s side. She’s returned repeatedly to the writer’s residence ever since.
On a recent afternoon, Monti was upstairs in her sitting room, healing from a tumble that left her with four stitches on her face but her spirit unscathed: “A fallen woman,” she deadpanned. Her eyes were the blanched blue of sea glass, a silk scarf was knotted around her neck, and she was surrounded with books and artworks by the illustrious talents who have populated her life. Behind her was a canvas by Antoni Tàpies; Santa Maddalena has become a home to writers, but it also houses a decent museum’s worth of Modern art.
Her involvement with the art world began during her childhood on the island of Capri, she recounted, when she was the adolescent mascot of a creative milieu that included Italy’s premier novelists of the time, palling around with Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante and Curzio Malaparte, the latter of whom enjoyed bike-riding naked on the roof of his supervillain lair-like house.
The tower where Felipe Franco Munhoz, a writer from Brazil, is staying during his residency.
“There was a sense of total freedom in Capri then,” she said. “That island turned me eccentric for life.”
Her mother, an Armenian from Istanbul (then known as Constantinople), had died of typhus when Monti was 6. Her father, an Italian aristocrat, was away for years in Ethiopia — as cultural attaché, and later as a prisoner of war — leaving the child stranded with a callous stepmother. “The writers and artists seemed more agreeable to me,” she said. Both would buoy her life.
In 1955, Monti founded the Galleria dell’Ariete in Milan. At 25, she was one of few female gallery owners and rapidly established herself as the vanguard with early exhibitions of New York’s new school of abstraction — Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Mark Rothko — and of Italian painters and sculptors who defined an era — Lucio Fontana, Pietro Consagra, Carla Accardi, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni (indelible for his literal cans of “Artist’s Shit”).
continued in the next post
"A Tuscan Retreat Where ‘Literature is the Primary Value’"
From her idyllic estate, Beatrice Monti della Corte oversees a writer’s residency that has provided inspiration, camaraderie, and leisurely, wine-fueled meals to some of the foremost storytellers of our time.
By Laura Rysman
Dec. 16, 2023
If the baronessa Beatrice Monti della Corte has found a secret to life, it is stories.
At the Santa Maddalena writer’s residency at her rambling estate in rural Tuscany, Monti has hosted some of the foremost storytellers of our time — Zadie Smith, Michael Cunningham, Colm Tóibín, Teju Cole, Sally Rooney, Olga Tokarczuk, Michael Ondaatje, Edmund White, and a couple hundred others. While authors appreciate her hushed writing rooms with olive grove vistas, her company is the principal draw.
“The only things Beatrice won’t talk about,” Smith said, “are things that are boring.”
At 97, Monti is animated and unstoppable. She runs Santa Maddalena as her personal passion project, accepting no applications and choosing writers according to her instincts, in consultation with her network of friends, publishers and other authors. Her taste, developed over a lifetime of nurturing and being nurtured by literature and art, is considered a bellwether, with several fellows going on to win the Nobel, the Pulitzer, the Booker, the Prix Goncourt.
Pablo Maurette, an Argentine author, at work.
At Santa Maddalena, “literature is the primary value,” said Cunningham, an annual visitor for two decades. “There are times when I swear that enough significant work has been done in those rooms that they’re imbued with something, the way smoke will eventually inhabit the walls of a place.”
Nestled among the orchard slopes beyond Florence, Santa Maddalena appears like a quintessential Tuscan idyll: an ivy-cloaked farmhouse from the 1500s, a medieval stone watchtower, a swimming pool in the garden. But it’s also a worldly enclave: The pool is where the actor Ralph Fiennes, a friend of Monti’s since filming “The English Patient” nearby, likes to sunbathe in the summer; the tower is where the writer Bruce Chatwin would spend months working on his books between travels; the farmhouse — cleared by Monti of occupying chickens — was remodeled with the Modernist architect Marco Zanuso.
“I’d never seen anything so beautiful in my life,” Smith said of her initial visit to the estate — a quiet escape from the cyclone of fame following her publication of “White Teeth.” “I was such a parochial person. Part of Santa Maddalena was understanding that Willesden is not the center of the world,” she said of the suburb in northwest London.
In addition to being a retreat for writers, Santa Maddalena is also home to art collected by Monti over the course of her life — including, here, a portrait of her and portraits of her husband’s ancestors.
After her stay, Smith relocated to Rome for two years, learned Italian and even adopted a pug identical to the dog faithfully found by Monti’s side. She’s returned repeatedly to the writer’s residence ever since.
On a recent afternoon, Monti was upstairs in her sitting room, healing from a tumble that left her with four stitches on her face but her spirit unscathed: “A fallen woman,” she deadpanned. Her eyes were the blanched blue of sea glass, a silk scarf was knotted around her neck, and she was surrounded with books and artworks by the illustrious talents who have populated her life. Behind her was a canvas by Antoni Tàpies; Santa Maddalena has become a home to writers, but it also houses a decent museum’s worth of Modern art.
Her involvement with the art world began during her childhood on the island of Capri, she recounted, when she was the adolescent mascot of a creative milieu that included Italy’s premier novelists of the time, palling around with Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante and Curzio Malaparte, the latter of whom enjoyed bike-riding naked on the roof of his supervillain lair-like house.
The tower where Felipe Franco Munhoz, a writer from Brazil, is staying during his residency.
“There was a sense of total freedom in Capri then,” she said. “That island turned me eccentric for life.”
Her mother, an Armenian from Istanbul (then known as Constantinople), had died of typhus when Monti was 6. Her father, an Italian aristocrat, was away for years in Ethiopia — as cultural attaché, and later as a prisoner of war — leaving the child stranded with a callous stepmother. “The writers and artists seemed more agreeable to me,” she said. Both would buoy her life.
In 1955, Monti founded the Galleria dell’Ariete in Milan. At 25, she was one of few female gallery owners and rapidly established herself as the vanguard with early exhibitions of New York’s new school of abstraction — Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Mark Rothko — and of Italian painters and sculptors who defined an era — Lucio Fontana, Pietro Consagra, Carla Accardi, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni (indelible for his literal cans of “Artist’s Shit”).
continued in the next post
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