We’re getting to the time of year when I think a lot about the writing retreats I’ll host in the Autumn. Chief among them is A Haven for Stories, in Umbria, Italy. I’m sharing this Spring, 2022 post with you because, mentally, a chunk of me is there right now. Haven is now in its third year and we have a handful of spaces left for our retreat - this year’s promises to be the most thoughtful, meditative and creative yet. Head here to find out more.

My Italian is poor but I recognise the sense of what Morag is saying: she came here as a child, 20 years ago, and she will be back again in October to host a retreat. We are in rural Italy, in a village so high my ears funnel as we dive up and down the hills, even on foot. My mother brought me and my father, and then my siblings here, and now I have brought her back. 

Here is Villa Pia, a 15th-century manor house in Lippiano, a border town between Tuscany and Umbria. My memories of it are deeply soaked for just two little weeks in August, a year apart and two decades ago. I remember the long meals in a long dining room, how the locals danced in the town square on a Saturday night, the view from the pool across the rolling hills beyond. The large square chocolate cake dusted with cocoa powder; the awkwardness of my adolescent limbs, curled in a deckchair, knees either side of a Philip Pullman novel. I remember being hot and the stars that streaked the dark sky.  

When we rumble down the steep driveway and into the courtyard the old house and its adjacent barns are somehow so familiar I don’t feel the difference of time, but when we walk into the library I am suddenly, keenly, fourteen again. I can smell the chlorine on my hair, feel the heat left on my skin. In reality, we are in the midst of an early April cold snap; the fire is lit in the enormous inglenook in the kitchen. Woodsmoke lilts in the air. 

The next morning, I crack the shutters to blue skies. The forecast had predicted rain, but clean spring sun ekes through. I grab the swimming costume I threw optimistically in my luggage and head for the pool. It is 8am, and 4 degrees out; craving supersedes logic. There is birdsong on the wind and I feel the chill of the water thrum into my bones. 

The house, mum and I are agreed, is more beautiful than we remembered. We learn that the soft dove grey of the doors, the pale pinks and yellows of the walls and the intricate painted panelling of the coving and the ceilings date from the 19th century. A local lady keeps it looking impeccable; I wonder if it cricks her neck, to paint above her head. This place has been making visitors feel at home for decades; you come, you eat together, you help yourself to wine and coffee and fruit. We walk in the morning, and in the afternoon, mum re-discovers the piano. We sing James Taylor songs and the sound ricochets off the tiled floor. 

We pull armchairs around the window and as the mist draws in over the hills I write. It’s not something I did here before, but that is what I am back to do, and that is what will bring me back still. Over the marble-topped table Morag asks if I can imagine it, these rooms filled with talk of words and paragraphs and meaning and subtext. She outlines the spaces where we will hold workshops, I imagine kneading through another’s work beneath the wisteria, the pair of us cracking open avenues where there had previously been dead ends. I think a little of what I might be working on; what these greening trees will look like carrying the rust of autumn. 

We dreamed this up in the winter, and we named it A Haven for Stories. Now it is spring, and I wonder what ones we will tell.

There are a handful of places left for A Haven for Stories, the residential writing retreat that begins at Villa Pia this year, 19-26 October. For more information, click here.

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