The Italian Connection (Part 3)

This is a part of Switzerland that has long
attracted writers, artists and mystics. On the hillside above Ascona, Monte
Verita (“Hill of Truth”) was a commune before such things were fashionable.
Founded in 1900 as a “co-operative vegetarian colony” by the son of a Belgian
businessman, it quickly became a mecca for well-heeled anarchists and
naturists, freemasons and freethinkers, European Buddhists and earnest
alternative types of all descriptions. The better-known visitors included Carl
Jung, Erich Maria Remarque, Paul Klee and Rudolf Laban. Later a Bauhaus hotel
was built here by a German baron; newly restored, it’s now the centerpiece of
the Monte Verita conference centre. The Hill of Truth aims to be once again, as
the website proclaims, “a magnet for the convergence of ideas”, but comes
across today as a melancholy place, with its empty, leaf-strewn swimming pool
and post-utopian houses abandoned in the woods.

Description: Monte Verita (“Hill of Truth”)

Monte
Verita (“Hill of Truth”)

Though he visited Monte Verita, it was the
little doll’s-house village of Montagnola, on the ridge of the Morcote
peninsula south of Lugano, that German novelist Hermann Hesse chose to make his
home, first in rented property and then, from 1931 until his death in 1962, in
his own house. It was here in Montagnola, in between painting and gardening,
that Hesse did his best work, from Klingsor’s Last Summer (a paean to the
life-enhancing power of the south and its colours) to The Glass Bead Game.

Description: German novelist Hermann Hesse

German
novelist Hermann Hesse

The Hermann Hesse Museum in Torre Camuzzi –
in a wing of the first house the writer rented in Montagnola – is a touching
tribute to the man and the place he loved. We get to see his panama hat, his
gardening shears and his Smith Premier No.4 typewriter; but the lasting
impression is the sense of a wandering soul finding its perch. “The sun shines
more intensely here,” he wrote of his adopted home; “the mountains are rosier…
wine, almonds, figs and chestnuts grow, and the people are good, civilized and
friendly.” The tourist board could hardly have put it better; but after a week
of Ticino sun and cool Alpine water, good Ticinese food and wine, courtesy,
gentilezza and mountain air, I knew exactly what Hesse meant.

Description: Museum Hermann Hesse Montagnola