(Thinking about) Walter Benjamin in Liguria: Part 2.

    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, there is a point to embedding some of them in this project and certainly Benjamin needs to be included. 

    From what I have worked out, there is a lot of reading and thinking and also walking to do. Reading Benjamin's correspondence from Liguria will be one of my aims, walking on the paths that he took in Liguria is another straightforward thing I plan to do (a walk to Bussana Vecchia is a definite plan as it seems to have a truly extraordinary story). The ponente of Liguria is home not just to the Situationists but a number of radical, avantguarde phenomena and the story of the Community of International Artists in Bussana Vecchia is also a fascinating tale. 

        One of Liguria's most interesting contemporary authors, Marino Magliani, who divides his time between the Ligurian ponente and the Netherlands, has provided another basis for thinking about Benjamin. He authored a novel (The boy and the islands [Calvino's Dream]) on an immaginary encounter between Walter Benjamin and a young Italo Calvino (who grew up in San Remo). Maybe this too will offer a basis for rethinking Benjamin's presence. How to mythically rework Benjamin's presence in Ligurian while also building up a picture of his real, material presence and contact with the reality of San Remo in the mid 1930s will hopefully provide some useful bases for the San Remo part of this project. Trying to find a way of reading Eva Weissweiler's German language book (Villa Verde oder das Hotel in San Remo. Das italienische Exil der Familie Benjamin) on the hotel in San Remo owned by Dora Sophie Kellner (Benjamin's ex-wife) will be another way of deepening my understanding the area. There is then some fundamental background reading on concrete details of the locality to be done. One of the books I have is Rosell Postorino's account (Il Mare in Salita) of localities along the Riviera dei Fiori (from San Remo to Dolcedo). But there is also a need to locate the influence of the locality on Benjamin's whole thought in this late stage of his life (and on what he was working on). 

    Having said all this I have yet to visit San Remo and its vicinities so it so far a locality which I hope to visit extensively in 2025 and find a path to discovering how Benjamin (and Calvino etc), San Remo, and promises of utopia can somehow be blended together into a possible text.  San Remo, and its vicinities of course have many potential other leads to follow. Another fundamental presence in the area which I would like to write about next year is that of Lesia Ukrainka who lived in San Remo for two years between 1901 and 1903. A figure like Benjamin who travelled frantically through a large number of places and countries (in her case as an attempt to cure her tuberculosis). 

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