| Giulia Maria Beretta Ceramics Handmade Pottery Since 1988 | |
| Monte
Verita' is the name of the hill above Ascona, a small town on the shores
of the lake Maggiore in the south of Switzerland. The lake is divided
between Italian and Swiss territory. The name Monte Verita' (mount
of truth) was given by a theosophist colony that lived there at the beginning
of the 20th century.
Between 1870 and 1875 the Russian anarchist Michail Bakunin found refuge in neighbouring Locarno. His presence in the south of Switzerland created a stronger link with the Italian 'Internazionale', and turned the area into an important centre of reforming thinking. Towards the end of the 19th century, solutions to the malaise of modern times were searched in psychoanalysis and the study of the human mind. Members of the privileged classes felt that a return to more primitive ways of life could cure the discontents of civilization. This ideological climate set the basis for the alternative colony on the Monte Verita'. A strategic position between South and North, favourable climate, extraordinary light intensity and the magnetism of its geology made of this untamed Garden of Eden the perfect location for a new start. Its inhabitants came from northern countries (mostly German speaking), led simple lives in small wooden huts, practiced a vegetarian diet, were nature-worshippers and invented their own pagan rites. Sadly, like for most idealistic ventures, the utopia of the return to nature was short lived... ...
but Ascona remained an important cultural centre even after the failure
of the colony on the hill. The alternative-life seekers were not the only ones attracted to the Monte Verita'. In the mid 20's German Baron Eduard von der Heydt, purchased the land where the colony used to surge. The wealthy tycoon, intended to create there a 'universal village' where international politics, finance, culture and ideologies could cohabitate free of prejudice and take advantage from the recognized beneficial proprieties of the area. In 1928 he commissioned Bauhaus architect Emil Fahrenkamp to built the Hotel Monte Verita', initiating the tourist development of the village, but also of the whole region. Another interesting Bauhaus building on the hill is the Teatro San Materno, built between 1927 and 1928 by architect Karl Weidemeyer, on a brief of dancer Charlotte Bara. Bara aimed to perpetuate the modern dance heritage of great innovators and former Monte Verita' guests: the Russian Rudolf Von Laban and the Brit Mary Wigman. In the 50's, mass tourism began its conquest of Ticino, and most of the wild mysterious charm got irreparably lost. If the true Monte-Veritaneans, did not leave a visible mark on history, many visitors of the mount did: Hermann Hesse, D.H. Lawrence, Alfred Kubin and James Joyce in literature, Mary Wigman, Rudolf Laban and Isadora Duncan in modern dance, Alexey von Jawlensky, Paul Klee, Marianne von Werefkin, Hans Arp, Sofie Tauber, Tristan Zara, Hugo Ball, Walter Gropius and Oskar Schlemmer in art, Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung in Psychoanalysis. The Ascona way of life was an idea imported from strangers, and predictably little influenced the local population, which could hardly relate to the eccentricities of its, at times prestigious, guests. The Hotel Monte Verita', The Teatro San Materno, the Casa Annatta (small museum in restored original wooden building of the time of the colony) and the melancholic atmosphere of the surrounding woods are now the only witnesses of a movement that tried in vane to return to a life in tune with nature and the cosmos. Paradoxically the local building contractors, supported by the government, wish to cash-in from the prestigious history of the site and aim at attracting wealthy tourists by annihilating the few remains of an untamed nature, thus turning Ascona into a concrete jungle. Giulia Maria Beretta This
is only a rough introduction to the history of the Monte. |
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