When on Lake Maggione art sought harmony with nature

Year 1900: on Monte Verità intellectuals and artists fled from civilization to gather in one of the most radical, pioneering and enlarged utopian, social and artistic communities. An exhibition in Florence

Back to Nature, back to nature: the prospect is as tempting as it is nebulous. What nature are we talking about? Of the “bad” one that Antonio Gurrado wrote about last July, on the Foglio website, thinking back to the screening of the magnificent film La Nature by Artavazd Pelechian, an over 80-year-old Armenian director, capable of embellishing overwhelming storms with an unfortunately little known aesthetic confidence , thrilling tornadoes, pernicious volcanoes and devastating glaciers? Or we allude to the gloomy omens on which Antonio Pascale has focused, always on these pages, but in the last September, reporting the opinion of climatologists sure that floods like those that occurred in the Marche will be events with which we will get married (sic!) In a near future? Fortunately, the Back to Nature text has an unequivocal supertitle – Monte Verità – and it is these two magical words that bring us back not only to the beginning of the 20th century when nature, perhaps, had not yet completely rebelled against our disrespectful neglect in comparisons, but in the heart of one of the most radical, pioneering and enlarged utopian, social and artistic communities of a not so distant time: that of Ascona on Lake Maggiore.