Pulitzer Winner Sets Novel in Italian Writers' Retreat

The Guardian's books critic has reviewed Villa Coco, the latest novel by Andrew Sean Greer, the Pulitzer Prize winner whose 2017 debut Less became an international success. Set in Italy and inspired by Greer's two-year tenure directing the Santa Maddalena Foundation—a residency for writers in Tuscany—the novel takes the familiar premise of the artist abroad and renders it as a study in insecurity, self-discovery and the comedy of displacement. The Guardian describes it as a "breezy confection of fish-out-of-water wit," a portrait of someone seeking purpose in what appears to be an Italian paradise.

The Santa Maddalena Foundation, located near Florence, has long attracted English-language writers seeking time away from commercial and domestic pressures. Greer's direct experience running such a space—managing the expectations of resident writers, the rhythms of creative work, the peculiar intimacy of a retreat—becomes the novel's raw material. What emerges, according to the review, is not a straightforward celebration of Italian escape but a more complicated exploration of why writers seek such refuges and what they find—or fail to find—once they arrive.

The novel's publication marks a return to Italy as literary subject at a moment when foreign publishers and readers have maintained steady interest in English-language fiction set in the country. Italy's landscape, its cultural inheritance, and the particular experience of the foreigner navigating Italian life have sustained a genre—one that ranges from serious literary fiction to lighter comic narratives. Greer's novel, as the Guardian frames it, sits closer to the comic end, though grounded in recognizable psychological truth.

For Italy's cultural economy, the attention to writers' retreats and residencies reflects a broader pattern: the country's appeal as a destination for creative work, not only for tourism but for sustained artistic practice. The Santa Maddalena Foundation is one of several such spaces—the Civitella Ranieri, the American Academy in Rome, the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center on Lake Como—that anchor Italy's role in the international literary infrastructure. Foreign coverage of Italian culture increasingly treats these residencies as part of Italy's soft power, a way the country sustains its reputation as a place where serious creative work happens.