01/01/2024
This is an interesting article about Mary Shelley, one of the writers of the Team UK in the group D of the World Cup Of Literature
https://www.laprovinciadicomo.it/stories/cultura-e-spettacoli/como-guglielma-lintuizione-mary-o_1616147_11/?fbclid=IwAR2R6xNlBGy82sOMLHa_TzJgT9-VcqPSrumXkJNahZbYBSCqci9I7NwS388
Since the article is in Italian, I've used a translator to report below the English translation
You can still vote at page https://podcastdibuonanotteallineamentiradiociaocomo.wordpress.com/world-cup-of-literature-2023/
“Mary Shelley and the others. Grandtouriste on the Greenway” is the title of the walk that on Sunday 3 September, between Lenno and Ossuccio, will lead you to discover not only enchanting places, such as the churches of San Giacomo and Santa Maria Maddalena opened for the occasion, but also
the works dedicated to the Lario by Mary Shelley and other authors. At the end, "via Mary Shelley" will be inaugurated, a name that the Municipality of Tremezzina has decided to attribute to a stretch of the Greenway on the border with Sala Comacina, by virtue of the great attention that the English writer paid to Lake Como in her life and in his works. Info and registration: https://shelley greenway.eventbrite.it
You can fall in love with Lake Como even without ever having been there, like the American painter Sophia Peabody, who in 1839 gave her future husband, the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, two views of the lake, copied, as we have demonstrated on other occasions, from prints of “Picturesque Journey”, published in 1822 by the Swiss Wetzel. However, the fact that one of the most important writers of all time, Mary Shelley, included it in her three most significant novels, after having only been there for a weekend at the age of 19 until then, arouses some impressions of her. Also because they are not citations of circumstance, but rather proof that the author was able to listen to the "genius loci".
Reader of the Plinii
The discovery of Como occurred primarily through the reading and translation of the works of Plinii, which Mary and her husband Percy had awaited during the summer of 1816 spent with Lord Byron at Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva. It is no coincidence that since the first edition of "Frankenstein" (1818) Pliny the Elder has been listed among the favorite readings of the eponymous scientist. But after the Como weekend, the Lario enters in style in the third edition (1831), in which the protagonist's half-sister and future wife, Elizabeth, becomes a foundling adopted by her parents during a trip to Lake Como, where she lived in a peasant hovel, because the patriot father had been arrested by the Austrians who had also seized his villa. In the fifth chapter of the book, that same villa, returned to the revolutionary pardoned by the emperor, becomes the honeymoon destination of Frankenstein and Elizabeth. The enthusiasm for the Lario grew, in Mary Shelley, hand in hand with that for the patriots who intended to restore unity and freedom to Italy, one of the two incubators of European culture (for the other, Greece, Byron sacrificed his life). In 1844, in fact, he published "Rambles in Germany and Italy", an account of his travels written to raise funds for the carbonari. One tome is dedicated almost entirely to the two months spent on the Lario in 1840 and was published for the first time in an Italian edition in 2020 with the title "Walking around Lake Como", edited by the writer and Claudia Cantaluppi for Sentiero of Dreams.
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Mary's favorite place is the Pliniana villa in Torno, where it is no coincidence that she sets the only idyllic parenthesis experienced by the protagonists of the apocalyptic novel "The Last Man" (1829). We had already accounted for all this. This time we want to focus on "Valperga", a work which marks its bicentenary. The story narrated takes place at the beginning of the era of the Lordships, on which Shelley documented herself by reading countless Italian authors. If the two main protagonists, Castruccio and Euthanasia, who embody two different ways, male and female, of understanding life and power, are rooted in Tuscany, there is a third figure, Beatrice, who instead comes from Lombardy. An invented character, but that Mary creates from a real woman, William of Bohemia, a heretic for the Church, who burned her remains in 1300 in Milan together with three living followers, but celebrated as a saint in Brunate, where in the parish church it preserves the only "portrait" of her that escaped the Inquisition, as well as the subject of several essays in recent years, after she was re-evaluated as a forerunner of gender equality and interreligious dialogue.
The painting depicting Saint Guglielma in the church of Sant'Andrea in Brunate
The painting depicting Saint Guglielma in the church of Sant'Andrea in Brunate
In the novel, Mary Shelley writes that it was Maifreda da Pirovano, the "high priest" who brought the Holy Office's attention to the Williamites by celebrating Easter mass in 1300 (a practice forbidden to women even today), who saved Beatrice. This is the narration attributed to Maifreda herself: «When I learned that Andrea Saramita and our other disciples had been captured, I was struck by terror for the fate of this little girl. [...] Better are the wild beasts of the forest and the storms of the sky [...] than a man who hunts for prey! So I took the little girl in her arms, a bag of gold and put some supplies I had at home in a bag. As soon as it was dark I hurried from Milan towards the forest that runs along the road towards Como [...]. I knew that a person affected by leprosy lived in the heart of the forest, a poor wretch, who with a wooden spoon and a plate, begged on the side of the road. [...] I knew they wouldn't dare take her from the home of a l***r. I didn't fear contagion: isn't she perhaps her mother above all the saints in Heaven?"
The inauguration of the street
For similar reasons, that is, because the inquisitors would never have ventured onto the paths that led to the mountain above Como, according to Barbara Newman, author of “The Heretic Saint: Guglielma of Bohemia, Milan, and Brunate” (2005), the painting of that which her followers believed to be the "incarnation of the Holy Spirit" (but she always denied) would be entrusted to the nuns of Brunate. The real link between Guglielma and the Como woods is still the subject of studies, but Mary Shelley in her own way intuited it and, above all, was the first to understand the modernity of the "heretic saint".
It is pleasing that this attention of the English writer for the Lario has also been grasped by a public administration, the Municipality of Tremezzina, which on Sunday 3 September will name a section of the Greenway in Ossuccio after her. It will be an opportunity for us (and for you, if you want) to retrace in the field the places, stories and works that we have written about many times on these pages with the creative walk whose references you can find in the sheet on the side.
In “Valperga” (1823) Shelley associa il Lario alla santa eretica. Quattro i suoi libri “comaschi”, compreso il celebre “Frankenstein”. Il 3 settembre le sarà intitolata una via a Ossuccio che si inaugurerà con una passeggiata letteraria
