Lugano, Switzerland

In the spring of 1995 when I was fifteen years old my parents had the school extend the spring breaks of my sister and I and the whole family went off on a long and highly stimulating road trip through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, plus one night in Strasbourg and a quick leisurely pass through Liechtenstein. It is easy to remember that this was the spring of 1995 because when we got back to the hotel in Frankfurt where we'd started, right at the end of our trip, all the newspapers were screaming in self-explanatory German about the Oklahoma City federal building bombing. Every couple years I have a situating historical landmark like that. On one long day of driving I managed to read the entirely of The Catcher in the Rye and then the first third-or-so of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. The most captivating and magnetic place I visited that trip was Lugano, Switzerland—see one of the photos I took immediately below—which feels an awful lot like somebody transplanted a piece of the French Riviera into the Swiss mountains employing little else save brute strength and counterintuitive logic. I felt that place like warm light in my bones and circulating in my blood.

Lugano played an important role in the personal and intellectual development of Friedrich Nietzsche, who loved the Swiss mountain-and-lake regions very much. Lugano is where Nietzsche's complicated romantic pursuit of author, psychoanalyst, and boy-crazy globetrotter Lou Salomé came to a head and dropped him in his own tracks. 1882, Salomé, along with Nietzsche and writer Paul Rée, visited the area surrounding Lake Lugano. While staying there, Nietzsche and Salomé went on long mountain hikes and kept close quarters. According to historical accounts from those who knew both it was during these mountain excursions that Nietzsche's obsession with Salomé deepened and he is generally believed to have made a failed marriage proposal, a major turning point in his turbulent life and definitely not a good one. Even if you try to be optimistic and generous, all of the turning points in Nietzsche's life look pretty dismal.

Lou Salomé (with whip), Paul Rée, Friedrich Nietzsche

German-born Nobel Prize winner and grand literary mystic Hermann Hesse lived in Montagnola, on the hills above Lugano, for over forty years. Steppenwolf and Siddhartha were written there. You'd think the unshaven and the unkept would be heading there in pilgrimages like Chaucer's. Point-to-point communication, mountain-to-mountain. You shan't get a new diskette if you cannot practice your etiquette. Argentinean grand literary mystic Jorge Luis Borges ended up with his family in Lugano happenstantially, immediately subsequent to the First World War, when he was still only eighteen. After the death of Borges’s maternal grandmother in 1919, the family left Geneva and chose to settle in Lugano because it was beautiful, relatively inexpensive, peaceful (off the beaten track), and it wasn't going through the protracted sanitation and public health nightmare all the major European cities seemed to be sharing in immediately after the war and its disposable human millions. For reasons not at all different from Hesse and the Borges clan, Mikhail Bakunin, bold Russian revolutionary and godfather of anarchism, retired to Lugano...for about a year...and then died the year after that. He went for the peace and the beauty. He'd more or less just turned sixty. When you get to be about sixty the expectation is that you start conducting your revolutions with pen rather than with brick. Don't stress. I find one quickly gets the knack.  

Lake Lugano, 1945/46, Christoph Traugott