I first came to Santa Maddalena five years ago, when I was only twenty-three. To me – a city kid, barely an adult - everything was new: the constellations of fireflies, the fresco on the bathroom wall, a swimming pool with fresh river water in it, the smart conversation with smart people, conducted in many languages, at an outdoor table with the moon huge and watchful overhead. All of it was new and wonderful to me. But I assumed, at first, that Santa Maddalena itself was an old, celebrated establishment of many years standing, a familiar gem in the crown of Tuscan cultural life. I had no idea it had only opened its doors to writers the year before. The list of previous retreaters seemed already too long and spectacular, it included Pulitzer and Booker prize winners, there were Frenchmen, Indians, Spaniards, Irishmen, Africans. There were already several novels and poems that had assimilated the Baronessa as a character or slipped her little pug, Alice, into a supporting role. How could all this have been done in a year?

Two words: Beatrice Monti. Or if you prefer, seven: Baronessa Beatrice Monti della Corte von Rezzori.

The Baronessa is an impatient woman. She hasn’t time to wait around for traditions to establish themselves. Everything must happen at once. There can be no ‘lean years’ or time spent struggling in obscurity. If she were organising the Renaissance, she would have shoe-horned the thing in to five years instead of two hundred. So it is with Santa Maddalena. It was famous from the day of its inception; its guests were always of the highest quality; writers who left recommended that their fellow writers visit. With impossible speed you found you could speak of the Santa Maddalena retreat in New York, in Paris, in London, in Berlin and watch other writers sidle up to you, attempting to look casual while enquiring how they, too, might get an invitation.The answer is simple: write to the Baronessa, send your book, see what happens. Thus reassured, the enquiring writer becomes nervous: will they enjoy it? The answer to this, again, is simple. Santa Maddalena is not for everyone. You must like informality. You must enjoy the six varieties of Tuscan gossip: local, political, sexual, personal, infamous and intellectual. You must like dogs, both small, medium and enormous. You must forego the pleasant English dream of a fried breakfast. It helps if you swim, eat carbohydrates and confront the reality of mosquitoes with the spirit of the Stoics. Most of all, you must like your fellow writers. You must like them on their good and bad days, when they have written two thousand words and when they have written nothing at all. You must pour a generous glass of Grappa for the man who has checked his e-mail and discovered his worse enemy has been given the Nobel. You must not balk when you see last year’s winner of the Prix de Goncourt in his speedos.

It’s a wonderful thing to see a tradition being born, to feel yourself a part of something that creates its legacy daily, in stories and memories and, of course, in books. It will be a scholar’s job, some years from now, to seek the faint watermark of Santa Maddalena rising through the pages of so many different writers – a lizard on page 65, a dog on 32, a pretty girl from Donnini skipping lightly through chapter three, to arrive at chapter four, as our heroine. Santa Maddalena takes writers out of themselves, out of their habits and tastes, their libraries, their towns, their literary parties and even their reputations. It strands them in a Tuscan valley where their only indeifying characteristic is their talent and what they are able to do it when there is nobody around to distract them.

What kind of place is Santa Maddalena? A noble enterprise, an indulgent fancy, an important meeting of minds, and a decadent literary house party. It is all these things. Most importantly, however, it is a place where work gets done.

Zadie Smith