Silvia Carnelli (Ph.D Student)

The project deals with two cultural places that play a central role in the cultural history of 20th-century Europe.

Monte Verità is a hill in the Swiss canton Ticino. In the year 1900 an alternative community was founded there. Its goal consisted in establishing a radical way of life according to the motto “return to nature”. In this way the founders wanted to heal the spiritual and health decline of the modern society. During the first half of the 20th century Monte Verità became a meeting point for many cultural movements. Artists of the Avantguarde, “Lebensreformer” (German term for the representatives of the counterculture), anarchists, esoteric secret orders and the theosophical society “Eranos” gathered in the sanatorium.

Glastonbury lies in Somerset (England). Since the discovery of the tombs of King Arthur and of his wife Guineviere in the Abbey in the year 1191, Glastonbury has been recorded within the collective memory as the legendary Isle of Avalon. This conception is connected with the hill of the ”Glastonbury Tor” which lies nearby. The “Tor” is supposed to be a pre-Christian cultic site. During the 20th century many cultural currents which were built on the Celtic past gathered in Glastonbury. Esoteric communities, New Pagan movements (Druids and Goddess Worshippers), Ley-Lines Hunters and New Age currents came to the place. Finally, since the 1970s the famous “Glastonbury Festival” takes place once a year. This festival is considered as one of the meeting points of the alternative music scene since the hippie era.

This work aims to underline the relevance of both places for the European 20th-century cultural history. For this purpose the first step of the analysis consists in the description of the common features between them – those cultural phenomena that have developed in both places. Actually, these phenomena can be traced back to the same cultural current, the so called “New Romanticism”. Both places testified the development of movements which were animated by the following ideas: the “sacralization” of nature and of the mythical past; the critic against the materialistic and capitalistic society; the search for the “inner freedom” – independence from the dogmas of the religious as well as the secular institutions; the integration of the “old” and “know” theories with the “new” (e.g. spiritual traditions from the Far East). As a result, Monte Verità and Glastonbury are categorized as cultural projections of the 20th-century New Romanticism. Furthermore, this theoretical concept which explains their function is based on Foucault´s theory of “heterotopias”.

All in all, the main aim of the project consists in the analysis of the variety of cultural projections that have developed in both places. In this context, the research focuses on two lines: first, the “cultural relevance”: description of the view of the world of the cultural currents and how it is related to the place; second, the “literary representation”: analysis of the representation of the places by the movements in the place bound literature. Furthermore, the theoretical part deals with the philosophical discussion about the “constitution” of cultural places – a topic that answers to the research interest of the graduate school “philosophy of place”.