Along the gulf of poets – Giuliano Malatesta

Nestled between the hills and the sea, the bay of Lerici, in the province of La Spezia, is a border area, geographic and beyond. Where the river Magra meets the waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea and where the Ligurian cliffs show the last stronghold, before giving way to the long maritime plain.

For some time, tourism marketing has renamed it “gulf of poets”, borrowing a definition that the writer and playwright Sem Benelli gave of it at the beginning of the twentieth century in the eulogy of his friend and scientist Paolo Mantegazza: “Blessed are you, o poet of science, may he rest in peace in the gulf of poets ”. But the area was frequented by writers since the time of Dante, who visited it in the period of his Florentine exile, as evidenced by some references contained in the Commedia.

The tour of the gulf of poets can start right from Villa Magni, which in recent years has been transformed into a boutique hotel and is being renovated in recent months. The white house on the sea is no longer isolated from the rest of the village and the construction of the road has made the residence less scenic. But the view of the bay from the huge terrace, with the islands of Palmaria and Tino on the horizon, is still spectacular.

From San Terenzio a pleasant walk along the coast leads in just over twenty minutes to Lerici, whose hills are now besieged by second homes that aspire to overlook the gulf. However, its old village remains a symbolic place, where the most extraordinary took shape good retirement Italian of the twentieth century.

From the port you have to go through one of the narrow crêuze that climb inside, climb up to the hillock and look for, hidden among the vegetation, Villa Rupe Canina, “high on the red roofs of Lerici”. A triumph of terraces, pergolas and belvedere overlooking the sea that the publisher Valentino Bompiani, “hero of good manners” according to the definition of the writer Raffaele La Capria, bought after World War II from an elderly sea captain.

The villa soon became the epicenter of an entire community that included many of its writers, including Alberto Moravia, Umberto Eco, the Mauri brothers, Ottiero Ottieri, Edoardo Sanguineti and Alberto Arbasino. But also an Italo Calvino already worried by the first symptoms of building speculation and a very young Mario Spagnol, still unaware that his life would change in the turn of a summer, that of 1954, when he began his publishing career in Bompiani.

From the villa Rupe Canina you can walk to the castle of Lerici, which today houses the geopaleontological museum. In those same years the fort became famous thanks to the initiative of Maddalena Di Carlo, a former partisan relay that everyone knew with the name of Madì, who transformed a part of the castle into a legendary hostel.

The fort was transformed into a meeting place for international travelers and vagabonds of all kinds, who ventured into those areas still little known in the footsteps of Shelley and his wife Mary. To get in touch with the castellana, another nickname of her, it was enough to write a letter addressed to “Madì, queen of vagabonds”.

It is said that even Marshal Philippe Pétain, head of the collaborationist French government during World War II, became a fan of his. Many of her wrote about her, from TS Eliot to William Somerset Maugham. Ernest Hemingway came to these places specifically to meet her.

From Lerici you have to go up the hill and follow for four kilometers the panoramic road towards the east that leads to Tellaro, one of the most beautiful villages in Italy: a handful of pastel-colored houses perched on a rocky spur overlooking the gulf. Eugenio Montale described it as follows: “Domes of foliage from which spurts / a polyphony of lemons and oranges / and the evanescent veil of a foam / of a sea powder that no foot / of man has touched or seems / but unfortunately the train accelerates… “.

At the entrance to the town, a plaque commemorates Mario Soldati. The house where the Piedmontese writer lived is still there, surrounded by pine and olive trees that slope towards the sea. Soldati arrived there following in the footsteps of a phantom travel chest by David Herbert Lawrence, in which an unpublished manuscript of him was said to have remained.

Years earlier, in fact, the British writer had stayed in Fiascherino, in the Gambrosier cottage, in the company of Baroness von Richthofen, also known for being the cousin of the Red Baron, a hero of German aviation. Of course Soldati never managed to find that chest, some say it never existed. However, he fell in love with this place, which at that time could only be reached by sea and which he defined as “a nirvana between sea and sky”, and never went away. Sometimes he was accompanied at the most to La Spezia to give life to legendary games of scopone to the cry of “it is more difficult to know how to drop than to take”.

From Tellaro the advice is to go up towards Montemarcello (for trekking lovers you can also walk a beautiful path), a village of Roman origin that rises like a sort of balcony suspended over the gulf, and then from there go back down for the last stop towards Bocca di Magra, a hamlet in the municipality of Ameglia, where the Ligurian hills end and the Tuscan plain begins.

One of the first to arrive, towards the end of the twenties, was Eugenio Montale. But it was after the war that this anonymous village overlooking the river, where until 1961 you could only arrive by ferry, was transformed into a refined Einaudian fiefdom, a cultured intellectual meeting place where it could happen to meet Giulio Einaudi who conversed with Elio Vittorini, the poet Vittorio Sereni engaged in long walks or the American writer Mary McCarthy intent on writing letters to her friend, the philosopher Hannah Arendt.

In addition to the chatter and gossip under the pergola, in those days there was not much else to do but go to the famous Sans façon, the legendary inn now owned by the Germi family. In the evening, however, he would cross the river again to go dancing at the dance hall on the stilts of Fiumaretta, as Marguerite Duras told in the book The sailor of Gibraltar.

Later this singular “republic of writers” also formed an association with the aim of having a regulatory plan approved to curb the first attempts at speculation. But it was all in vain. The irony of the writer Luciano Bianciardi made itself felt in the form of a sarcastic nursery rhyme. He began like this: “Come on friends! In a thick group we defend the cliff ”.