Casa Coraggio, Bordighera

Casa Coraggio, facade

Casa Coraggio is one of the historic buildings of the city of Bordighera in Liguria. Built with stones, the 19th Century building is located at the 34 of Via Vittorio Veneto.

History

Casa Coraggio, memorial plaques for George MacDonald and Edmondo De Amicis

While the exact date of construction is unknown, we know that during the period going from 1879 to 1902, the Villa was inhabited by the Scottish writer George MacDonald. Mac Donald had two daughters, Lilith and Grace, both of whom where sick with tuberculosis. Doctors had advised him to move them to a location with a dry and kind climate in order to improve the chances of recovery. Bordighera, having become famous thanks to the recently publicized novel “Il Dottor Antonio” by Giovanni Ruffini, was chosen as a perfect place to relocate.,.[1][2]

MacDonald went to live there with his family in the big Villa in Via Vittorio Veneto. The vast living room could host as much as two hundred people, and it rapidly became a centre of the British community and the intellectual groups that resided in the area. MacDonald organised several entertainments like concerts and theatrical representations, every Wednesday he presented and read aloud the verses of the best British poets of the time.[3] All of this made his house an important cultural building in the city and it was named “Casa Coraggio” (House courage) as a tribute to George MacDonald’s motto: “Corage! God mend al”.”,.[4][5]

After MacDonald died, the house was sold and transformed into the hotel “Hôtel de la Reine”, which was chose by Edmondo De Amicis as a winter residence because of its’ historical links to MacDonald. De Amicis even wrote one of his “Pagine spiritose” on Bordighera, calling it the “Englishman’s paradise” (1903). Bordighera was also the place in which De Amicis died on 11 March 1908 due to a cerebral haemorrhage.[6]

After WWII put an end to British and German tourism in Bordighera the hotel went into a severe crisis from which it never recovered. It later closed and was transformed into an apartment block, on the façade one can see memorial plaques that remember both George MacDonald and Edmondo De Amicis[7]

Note

  1. ↑ Casa Coraggio in “Eva Gore-Booth: An image of such politics", by Sonja Tiernan 2012
  2. ↑ Casa Coraggio in “George MacDonald: Victorian Mythmaker" by Rolland Hein, Wipf & Stock Publshers 1993
  3. ↑ A visit to Casa Coraggio on MacDonald’s page
  4. ↑ George MacDonald in Bordighera on the Bicknell’s blog
  5. ↑ Life and death of Edmondo De Amicis on Bordighera’s portal – In Italian
  6. ↑ The death of De Amicis – in Italian
  7. ↑ History of Via Vittorio Veneto – in Italian

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Sunday, September 27, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.