Santon's Notebook (Notes of an Errant Kraeved).

     With some of the bare details discovered about Walter Benjamin's sojourns in Liguria (there is also his time in the resort of Poveromo in nearby Versilia), I want to set down some details about how to develop these initial 'discoveries'. What does Benjamin's presence in the mid 1930s (and earlier presence) allow us to think about? Does it provide us with new opportunities of developing this 'Liguria project'? After all, I do not want to get entrapped in a kind of 'foreign visitors' to Liguria project (although the availability of masses of material will be hard to resist). Both Italian and foreign language writings on all the presences from Shelley, Byron, Nietzsche, Dickens, Rubens, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, Smollett, Michelet, Valery, Flaubert, Mark Twain, Tsvetaeva, Gogol, Kandinsky and so on and so forth ad infinitum produce an overloading of the available texts on this region. The abundance is almost certain to be overwhelming. Nonetheless, t...

       Having read a variety of books on Liguria - many of which explicitly focus themselves on foreign visitors to the region - I was curious to learn about the Bejaminian connection to Liguria in Pagani's book on Benjamin (as Benjamin rarely gets mentioned as a visitor to Liguria, although he spent considerable time there). Mainly to the Liguria of the Ponente (at least if we think about more long term stays)- but occasionally moving to the west. In the mid 1920s he would travel by freighter from Hamburg through the ports of the Mediterranean. It stopped off at very points. One of them being Genoa. He would write: Now I’m lying on deck, the evening in Genoa before me, and the sounds of unloading freighters all around me as the modernized ‘music of the world’  .      Eiland and Jennings' biography of Benjamin mentions that this longer stop in Genoa (compared to other ports) meant that he would visit the Riviera and the famous walk along the promo...

           Given the rather haphazard emergence of this project and the idea that I want to use it as a kind of notebook or diary of what I am currently thinking about, I thought I would add some more words relative to the genealogy of the idea and how it has come to be formed in my mind. It is very much a project that has taken on aspects of other projects as I have tried to explain previously. So finding myself in Liguria (the village where my father was born) I have reimagined a project I was planning to work on in the Moscow Region (and maybe more widely on the peripheries of Moscow and other larger cities). Yet there are always links back to previous concerns and these links I discovered will provide or provoke a number of posts. I also want somehow to explain how these links arose along with some stories concerning them. For example, during my to-ing and fro-ing from Russia back to the UK and Italy in the past two decades I recall visiting the local (...

                    My idea of a book on The Red Riviera arose not in Liguria but in Carrara. Walking from the station of Carrara Avenza towards the centre I suddenly considered the fact that there were no alternative tourist guides to explore the revolutionary history of a town or city. Carrara's monument to regicide Gaetano Bresci, the anarchist corner of its cemetery and then the plentiful monuments and plaques and anarchist centres throughout the city would surely be a great alternative tour. Remants of utopia and revolution are everywhere if one cares to look and research a little bit. What is true of Carrara is also true of Liguria. At least that is what I have begun to discover over the past few months (and what I kind of knew all along). After all, even those places overrun by the parasitical rich have their stories to tell. Portofino was visited by Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch and Rapallo was lampooned by Lucia...

Predrag Matvejevic' - Mediterraneo: Un Nuovo Breviario Iain Sinclair - London Orbital Venedikt Erofeyev - Moskva-Petushki Walter Benjamin - The Arcades Project Alexander Radishchev - Journey from Saint Petersburg to Moscow Alexandra Petrova - Appendix Giuliana Bruno - Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film Laurence Sterne - A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy Maxim Osipov - Kilometer 101 Patrick Wright -  The Sea View Has Me Again: Uwe Johnson in Sheerness William Cobbett - Rural Rides Eric Hazan - The Invention of Paris Paolo Pagani - In Cammino con Walter Benjamin: Il Naufragio di un Genio e le Idee della sua Epoca Julio Cortazar and Carol Dunlop - Autonauts of the Cosmoroute Rebecca Solnit - Wanderlust: A History of Walking Vasily Alexeyevich Slevtsov - Vadimirka i Klyazma

                    I am starting another blog as my own personal circumstances have changed and so have the projects I intend to work on. If before 2022 I was mainly based in Russia and had been intending to embrak on a large project on Russian elektrichkaland  (namely, the places reached by local trains outside of the big cities) and more specifically the zone from Moscow to Petushki, then I am now based in Liguria, Italy. And the focus of my attention is this region and contiguous regions partly associated with it (Lunigiana, Versilia) as well as a fascination with the island of Sicily which I intend to visit and explore for an extended period (hopefully next year). And yet the Ligurian project has a lot of common threads with the Moscow-Petushki project. A preoccupation with place, peripheral locations, the idea of local knowledge ( kraevedenie  as they call it in Russian), the question of what makes up a landscap...