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Just 3 Kms. southwest of
Locarno, on the other south-facing side of the Maggia delta, is the
small village of Ascona, a magnet for idealistic, sun-starved
northerners for a century or more. The place was nothing more than a
fishing hamlet until the end of the 19th century, when a slow but
steady influx began of philosophers, theosophists, spiritualists,
pacifists and artists, most of whom were responding to the growing
belief that a return to nature was the best remedy for the moral
disintegration of Western capitalist society. The Russian anarchist
Mikhail Bakunin was the first, living in Locarno in the 1870s, and
at the turn of the century the artists Henri Oedenkoven and Uda
Hofmann established an esoteric, vegetarian artists’ colony on the
hill of Monte Verità beside the village. |
