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

                    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...