The Red Riviera Idea

      

         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 Luciano Bianciardi where he lived after his time in Milan. The extreme west of the region is known for being the birthplace of Situationism but less well known for having forged other political and artistic avantgardes.  

        The trouble, it soon became apparent, was one of geographical borders and historical limits. How artificial is Liguria as a landscape? Are there not more differences between the Liguria of the West (Ponente) and that of the East (Levante), than between, say, parts of Liguria and Versilia or the Apuan Alps? And then there is the question of the riviera and the hinterland. City and village. Geno(v)a requires a whole volume of its own. How long do we go back? We could of course try to give Ligurians a rebellious gene for weren't Ligurians in the forefront of an anti-imperialist struggle against the Roman Empire but Genoa's own colonialism surely complicates things. Revolts and insurrections in Genoa are a recurrent feature of its history. Can all this be worked into a single volume? Besides, Genoa is part of an international story. I had already thought of a project linking Genoa with Odes(s)a (and, perhaps, Trieste and Buenos Aires and maybe Lisbon and Barcelona, and then what about Livorno and Marseille?) as a kind of metaphysical landscape of port cities linked through history, migration and other connections.  No things are too porous (too errant) to make this an easily defined project. Each new fact rearranges how I think of the project.

        Two months ago I drew up a map of all the train stations in Liguria from Ventimiglia to Sarzana and each locality would then have its story or stories to be recounted. But at the core I wanted a psychogeographical approach and my aim is to walk on foot throughout (and beyond) Liguria. The entroterra (hinterland) is just as fundamental as the riviera. After all, so much of partisan/resistance history would be excluded from a railway centric description of Liguria (and beyond). Cosio d'Arroscia, the birthplace of Situationism, after all has no train station to serve it. What would be the point of leaving out that story? 

        But then there are the stories that are interesting in themselves although they have little to do with the utopia or insurrectional nature of the place. And what about the many connections that places have with anti-utopian or even rather fascist thinkers who nonetheless have a story of their own. The Rapallo of Ezra Pound and Friedrich Nietzsche is interesting nonetheless. Talking of Liguria without mentioning Eugenio Montale (an anti-fascist yes, but very much a liberal without a particularly rebellious streak in him) is also rather risky. They need to be there somewhere. So do other less obvious traits. To speak of Riomaggiore without mentioning Telemaco Signorini is not something I'd aim at but I'd still much prefer to focus more on Renato Birolli in Manarola. And then what of flora, fauna, geological aspects. They merit some kind of inclusion because space, locality and landscape play a fundamental part in this project. 

        It aims to be a kind of a Ligurian atlas of emotion(s) that will take in disparate elements informed by certain fundamental texts (some of which I have listed in the previous post). The idea of Liguria as a utopia scape needs to be directly related to its material and historical specificities. Things will become clearer over subsequent posts.