Summer Villa: The Retreat to Create... Frankenstein

Surely,

, away from the hustle and bustle of the city and the rudeness of the rabble, was invented by the Romans, who were not only exalted in celebrating leisurely nature, good at tempering the rhythm of the days and calm attention -as we can see in Horace's odes and Virgil's bucolic-, but they also carefully designed the perfect space to combine leisure and poetry.

The villa, which today is synonymous with lavish accommodation for celebrities and

with an endless retinue of retainers, was originally a laboratory for the senses, of which eminences such as Pliny the Elder gave a good account.

A real writer rarely takes vacations, and getting away from the madding crowd is not so much an excuse to stop, but to write at a different pace.

The retreat can be in a country house, but also a monastic cell or a chalet on the beach, and it is better that way, because in recent times

-be it in Tuscany, Ibiza or Tunisia;

a huge residence with a wide expanse of garden in which to get lost -

When a town appears in novels, it is usually to make a forceful moral judgment.

, the best fiction by the English writer Lawrence Osborne -from which now comes a film adaptation starring Jessica Chastain and Ralph Fiennes-, is a good example: a British couple goes to Morocco to participate in a long decadent party in a recreational villa organized by an expatriate who wants to be the synthesis between Paul Bowles and Tom Cruise, but along the way they run over a young local.

Nobody at the bacchanal seems to care: there is nothing less appetizing than a minor mishap that cuts them off from the weekend roll.

As in Michel Houellebecq's Platform, here Western decadence is expressed through a tacky hedonism that, logically, receives a harsh retaliation.

But this is now, because until

, although it was already showing signs of civilizing decrepitude and imaginative anemia, which is why Thomas Mann preferred to leave behind the pre-war bourgeois nonsense and set

in a sanatorium.

However, a legendary villa is etched in the best literary history: in 1816, while touring Europe for various reasons, a group of English people decided to stay for a few weeks in a property in the Swiss town of Cologny, near the lake Geneva.

It was called Villa Belle Rive, but the guest who had rented it - the poet Lord Byron, who was traveling with his mistress Claire Clairmont and the doctor John Polidori - preferred to name it Villa Diodati in honor of his hosts, and it has been known as such until the present day.

It is still possible to visit it, now converted into a complex of luxury apartments available for lease.

The story of the summer of 1816 at Villa Diodati

has been told a million times, and one more is worth it.

That time was especially cold in Europe -the global climate had changed due to the explosion of a tremendous volcano in Indonesia-, and what had to be a placid summer of walks, sex and libations became an atypical scratch that little motivated to go out of the mansion.

, was staying near the Villa Diodati

, along with his wife Mary, who was also the half-sister of the

's mistress .

One night, bored and locked up, they played at making up scary stories, and in those days of writing, imagination and polar temperatures

John Polidori invented the modern vampire in the pale, gaunt and thirsty figure of Lord Ruthven, who he modeled as a grotesque lookalike of Lord Byron -the two men were separated by a great tension, a misguided masculine envy-, and who ended up giving character to the most successful bloodsuckers of the 19th century,

.

in a novel that transcended the gothic tale a la Ann Radcliffe to introduce the science-fiction variant, granting Dr. Frankenstein the divine status that man can achieve thanks to the technology and Promethean breath.

Lord Byron began his splendid

and Percy, if there ever was a competition, came last.

Finished the challenge, each one continued his way;

Lord Byron quite rightly descended on Venice.

Balzac, Balthus and tennis players

After that summer of 1816, events accelerated: Polidori died five years later, Percy B. Shelley followed him a year later, and in 1824 Byron lost his life.

By then, the fame of Villa Diodati had made it a place of pilgrimage for writers such as Honoré de Balzac.

Its echoes continued to resound long after, as evidenced by the fact that the French painter Balthus lived there at the end of the Second World War.

Shortly after, it was acquired by the Washer Solvay family of tennis magnates.

If it hadn't been cold that summer, the course of fantastic literature would have been different, and we would have lost everything we know: perhaps the lineage of the lost souls of the Gothic novel, which ends up being tiresome, would have been extended;

Le Fanu would not have delved into the sexual dimension of vampirism in

;

and perhaps HP Lovecraft's cosmic monsters would never have appeared.

.

In any case, the lesson of Villa Diodati is equally moving: how many interrupted courses of the imagination have been aborted because whoever can write - and we do not blame him - has decided for a few days to devote himself to sailing, or seeing the world, and

On the contrary, they were born

Literary enclaves (II)

venetian palace

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