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Just 3 Km. 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. |
