Amy Reading
July Resident 2025
A Letter From Amy Reading: Suffering Gratitude, Villa Lena’s Abundance
Dear Villa Lena Readers,
As a writer, I do not need much to do my work. A laptop and the occasional wifi signal and electrical outlet will suffice. Over the long years of tapping away at my books, I have learned not to fetishize the conditions for writing. I have written in airport terminals during overnight layovers, in my frigid car with my laptop propped on the steering wheel during my kids’ sports practices, on park benches, in food courts and unhip grocery story cafes. Waiting for the right conditions—a dedicated office, a serene view, an espresso, absolute silence—is an exercise in rank procrastination.
Which is good, because I write these words amidst an historic heat wave that is scorching much of Europe. Florence and sixteen other Italian cities have been put on the highest alert for the next two days by the Health Ministry, with temperatures over 37ºC/100ºF.
And yet!
Villa Lena is almost unimaginably sumptuous, and its particular kind of luxury is working its magic on me—how could it not?!—and altering what I thought I knew about productivity. Something is happening here as I work on my third book in unrelenting heat and unflagging generosity.
My favorite moment of my routine here is the first one, when I leave my second-story room in the villa at 6am and head down the grand stone staircase. I am an early riser living with a cohort of late sleepers, so I move through intense stillness. The villa offers itself to me in this moment in a way that I find unexpectedly moving.
The front door is usually open to the elements. Outside, the sun is already bright and crisp, but inside, the villa’s thick walls and tile floors have held onto the night’s cool air. I walk around, just looking, taking in the frescoes and the gorgeous hardware on doors, walls, and windows. Here, the villa seems placidly to be saying, this is yours for the time being. I feel like a contessa.
The day goes something like this: I take a walk before the heat gets too intense and arrive back at the villa in time for the delivery of bread, pastries, fruit, yogurt, eggs, and coffee. I load up a plate and take it up to my room to shutter the windows against the lancing sun and read in front of the fan. Midmorning, I pack a bag and head down the hill to my studio, where I write to the sound of cicadas out the window, pausing only to step outside to the outdoor sink to splash water on my face and neck.
In the late afternoon, I return to the villa for a shower and more reading by the fan, rising often to type or scrawl something at my desk in front of the window. It is time to open the window and let the now-indirect light back in, and to relish the comfort of this room with its soaring ceiling and gorgeous trompe l’oeil fresco.
Often, a fellow artist will order a bottle of Prosecco or Vermentino for our table and we will clink glasses for no reason at all. One day, Julian, a staffer who lives in the villa and works in the garden, brought us an enormous bin of chard, and when all of us were far too languorous to cook it in our communal kitchen, he sautéed it with garlic and served it to us on the outdoor table by candlelight.
Another day, Paul, the flower gardener, rescued a bunch of hydrangeas and mums that had been thrown away after a lavish wedding on the grounds. They were wilting, but he dipped the stems in boiling water to resuscitate them and put them in buckets for us all to take to our bedrooms and studios. Each week, I look forward to the gorgeous bouquets that Irina, the floral designer, and Lena, the founder, arranges for the villa’s entryway. Such gratuitous beauty!
This is what I am reaching for in my work, what the Villa Lena residency is eliciting from me: a generosity, a new expansiveness. I mean this in two senses. As a writer and reader of literary criticism, I sometimes find myself in a place of narrow analysis or critique or categorization, but here I am looking to build something, to reach for an extra filigree or flourish, to elaborate a bountiful theory of how to read, to write toward a new horizon.
In my manuscript, Lewis Hyde writes of “suffering gratitude,” the heaviness of receiving a gift and the need to put it back into circulation. I immensely look forward to solving that problem—if I ever leave this place.
Yours,
Amy
