Positano

This article covers the town of Positano in Italy. For the Italian diplomat Positano see Vito Positano .

Positano
Country	Italy
region	Campania
province	Salerno  (SA)
Coordinates	40 ° 38 ′  N , 14 ° 29 ′  E Coordinates: 40 ° 38 ′ 0 ″  N , 14 ° 29 ′ 0 ″  E
height	0  m slm
surface	8 km²
Residents	3,854 (Dec 31, 2019)
Population density	482 inhabitants / km²
Post Code	84017
prefix	089
ISTAT number	065100
Popular name	Positanesi
Patron saint	San Vito
Website	Positano

Positano is a municipality on the Amalfi Coast in the province of Salerno in Campania , Italy , with 3854 inhabitants (as of December 31, 2019). Until December 11, 2008 it belonged to the mountain commune Comunità Montana Penisola Amalfitana . The place is characterized by tourism.

geography

Positano - seen from the beach

Positano

location

Positano is located on the south coast of the Sorrento peninsula , on the Amalfi Coast in a bay between Punta Germano and Capo Sottile in the province of Salerno. Today's place emerged from a small fishing village, the historical center of which lies below the state road SS163 , the Amalfitana, which is called G. Marconi in the place. Positano is criss-crossed by steep streets and many stairs.

In addition to the core town around the parish church of Santa Maria Assunta and the Piazza dei Mulini, the Fornillo part in the west, the Li Parlatti part above the state road, Arienzo, San Pietro and Laurito in the east, the two mountain villages Montepertuso and Nocelle as well as belong to the area of ​​the municipality the small archipelago of Li Galli .

Positano's neighboring communities are Agerola , Pimonte , Praiano and Vico Equense .

history

Recently, archaeologists have uncovered the remains of a Roman villa under the parish church of Santa Maria Assunta. The island of Gallo Lungo, the largest of the Galli Islands, has also been inhabited repeatedly since ancient times. In the Middle Ages, Positano belonged to the Duchy of Amalfi or the Amalfi Republic and had a port. The place grew significantly during the 16th and 17th centuries. At the beginning of the 19th century, King Joachim Murat stayed in Positano (today Palazzo Murat in Via Mulini). In the mid-19th century , more than half the population emigrated - most of them to America.

Fornillo beach section

In the first half of the 20th century, Positano was a poor fishing village. Between 1933 and 1945 it was a place of exile for German painters and writers. In the 1950s, Positano began to attract tourists. One of the triggers of the boom was apparently an essay by John Steinbeck in the US American magazine Harper's Bazaar in May 1953. He wrote: “Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn't quite real when you are there and becomes beckoningly real after you have gone. ”(“ Positano gets under your skin. It doesn't seem real when you're there, and it becomes enticingly real when you left. ")

The city is a member of the Cittàslow , a movement founded in Italy in 1999 to slow down and increase the quality of life in cities through environmental policy, infrastructure policy, urban and landscape quality, upgrading of local products and hospitality.

Attractions

Positano with the Church of St. Maria Assunta

• Churches of Santa Maria Assunta with a Black Madonna , Chiesa Nuova , Santa Caterina , Madonna del Carmine and Madonna delle Grazie in Montepertuso,
• The Positano cemetery is located high above the state road and can be reached via Via San Croce and Via Stefan Andres.
• Montagna Forata boulder , a monolith with many holes
• Marina Grande
• Grotta dell'Incanto
• Miniature cityscape in a rock wall on Via Pasitea / Via Fornillo junction

Commercial enterprise in place

Positano Moda

Textiles are manufactured in Positano under the name Positano Moda . The rustic fashion style is characterized by intense colors, ingenuity and the extensive use of lace. Mainly natural materials such as linen and cotton are used.

tourism

Positano, which has advanced to become a seaside resort, offers a large number of hotels, guest houses, holiday homes, holiday apartments and restaurants. As a result, the population increases tenfold in summer.

View from the lake to Positano

traffic

The state road SS 163 Amalfitana runs through Positano and connects the city of Meta with Vietri sul Mare . The provincial road SP 425 (Via Mons. S. Cinque) leads from Positano to the mountain villages of Montepertuso and Nocelle. The last stretch of the road to Nocelle was completed in 2001.

The bus company SITA offers bus connections from Positano to Meta and Sorrento as well as to Amalfi and Salerno. The Interno bus line runs continuously in the ring traffic to connect the lower (Piazza dei Mulini) with the upper parts of the city (Chiesa Nuova) . Some of the buses also go to Montepertuso and Nocelle.

In the tourist season until the beginning of November, smaller passenger ships run regularly to the island of Capri , Sorrento, Amalfi and Salerno.

Persons connected to Positano

• The Swiss Gilbert Clavel , who was involved in early Futurism , built a dilapidated 16th century watchtower from 1919 to 1927 into a total work of art , which Siegfried Kracauer described in his text Felsenwahn in Positano .
• The American painter Peter Ruta lived in Positano from 1953 to 1960.
• The German pianist Wilhelm Kempff lived in Positano from 1968 until his death in 1991. As early as 1957, he had founded the Beethoven interpretation courses here, which took place under his direction until 1982 in his Casa Orfeo. After his death, the master classes were continued by his students Gerhard Oppitz (1992 to 1995) and John O'Conor , who has led the courses since 1997.
• From 1989 the dancer Rudolf Nureyev owned the three islands of Li Galli .
• Katinka Niederstrasser , graphic designer
• Patricia Highsmith lived in Positano for a few months.
• John Steinbeck , Pablo Picasso , Tennessee Williams , Alberto Moravia as well as Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were certified as having “positano addiction”.
• Le Corbusier helped to renovate the villa on the Gallo Lungo in 1937 .

German-speaking artists in exile

In the period between 1933 and 1945, the poverty of Positano offered many people living in exile more favorable conditions for survival than the islands of Capri and Ischia, which were already better known at the time . This led to the fact that a real German writer and artist colony was able to establish itself in Positano and survive the years of National Socialism.

The most famous German artists in exile who found refuge here or who had lived here before 1933 included:

• Armin T. Wegner , poet, narrator and pacifist, who spent a few years of his exile here from 1936
• Irene Kowaliska , painter through whom Wegner found her way to Positano.
• Karli Sohn-Rethel , painter, lived in Positano from 1921 to 1951, with interruptions.
• Stefan Andres , writer, lived from 1937 to 1948 in Positano, which he knew from previous stays. One of his books bears the place name as the title ( Positano. Stories from a City by the Sea , Munich 1957). Several of his novels have Positano (literary cipher Città morta ) as the setting. The city named the street in which Andres' house stood in his honor via Stefan Andres .
• Lisel Oppel , painter.
• Paula Bärenfänger , Jewish painter who was partially paralyzed and lived in great poverty in Positano and who died here in 1953. Her pictures show Positano how she could perceive it in the face of her disability: landscapes that she saw from her bed.
• Kurt Craemer , painter.
• Bruno Marquardt , painter, born on February 11, 1904 in Insterburg , East Prussia , died on February 5, 1981 in Positano. He was a friend of Kurt Craemer's and finally settled in Positano in 1936, where he was also buried. He took part in several biennials and competitions and had exhibitions in Berlin, Königsberg, London, New York, Naples and Rome.
• Martin Wolff , painter and carpet weaver, probably born in 1898. He had made an application for release from German citizenship on his own initiative, which was then revoked. Wolff lived in Positano for more than twenty years, financed his livelihood partly through sales to tourists and during the war, as fewer and fewer tourists found their way to Positano, he was dependent on support from the Quakers . During the German occupation of Italy, he was deported to Auschwitz and died there.
• Walter Meckauer , writer. His wife temporarily ran a small photo shop in Positano.
• Joe Lederer , Austrian journalist and writer.
• Elisabeth Castonier , writer.
• Wolfgang Weber , journalist.
• Essad Bey , German-speaking writer of Russian-Jewish descent (actually Lew Abramowitsch Nussimbaum or Noussimbau). In 1938 he went into exile in Italy and died at the age of 36 on August 27, 1942 in Positano. Gerhart Hauptmann's poem Positano is dedicated to Essad Bey.
• Michele Theile , painter, born in Positano in 1935, lives and works there. He is the son of Ilse Bruck-Bondy, born on March 14, 1897 in Osterholz-Scharmbeck (died 1980 in Positano) and of the journalist and photographer Harald Theile . While Harald Theile, a friend of Armin T. Wegner, who had come to Positano in the early thirties, occasionally traveled to Germany again from 1936, where he worked for Simplicissimus , as well as from Positano , Ilse Bruck-Bondy lived, who had been active against the Nazis at an early stage, since 1933 permanently in Positano, temporarily also in Vietri sul Mare . In order to improve her financial situation, she supervised children and taught them German. These were mainly children of Neapolitan families who had found refuge in Positano until the liberation by the Allies in 1943.
• Spiegel online also commemorates the German intellectuals like Stefan Andres and Armin Wegner, who fled from the National Socialists to the little Campanian village .

Both the municipality of Positano and the province of Salerno keep their memory of them to this day, even if some of the aforementioned artists are largely unknown or forgotten in Germany today. This is not only represented by the street in Positano named after Stefan Andres, but also by a commemorative mass held at the end of 2005, at which the foreign exiles, many of whom are buried in the cemetery in Positano, were specifically commemorated. Short biographies and an overview of the work of the emigrants can still be found on the municipality's website, and the artists have been remembered on the Positano My Life website since 2010, most recently in September 2015. The museum and library of the Salerno Province has one own section for foreign artists and makes the life and work of many of the people mentioned above accessible on its website.

Town twinning

•  Thurnau (Germany) , since April 2000

literature

• Adolf von Hatzfeld : Positano. Pontos-Verlag, Freiburg / B. 1925.
• Kurt Craemer (Author), Rudolf Hagelstange (Ed.): Mein Panoptikum. Hoffmann & Campe Verlag, Hamburg 1965.
• Giuseppe Vespoli: Storia di Positano. TDA, Salerno 1976.
• Carlo Knight: La torre di Clavel. Un romanzo. La Conchiglia, Naples 1999 (Atyidae; 17).
• Klaus Voigt: Refuge on Revocation. Exile in Italy 1933–1945. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart Volume 1: 1989, ISBN 3-608-91487-0 ; Volume 2: 1993, ISBN 3-608-91160-X .
• Dieter Richter , Matilde Romito: Stefan Andres and Positano. A writer and artist “on the edge of the world”. Amalfi, Positano 2000.
• Dieter Richter, Matilde Romito, Michail Talalay: In fuga dalla storia. Esuli dai totalitarismi del Novecento sulla costa d'Amalfi. Catalogo della mostra artistica bibliografica e documentaria (Mostre in biblioteca). Centro di Cultura, Salerno 2005, ISBN 88-88283-34-X .
• Stefan Andres , Dieter Richter (ed.): Terraces in the light. Italian stories (works in individual volumes). Wallstein, Göttingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-8353-0427-7 .
• Heide-Marie Wollmann: German-speaking writer in Positano 1933-1945. In: Exil, Volume 6, No. 2, 1986, pp. 65–76.

Web links

Commons : Positano  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Positano: Opere (overview of works by German artists in emigration in Italian)
• Positano: Memorial fair for artists in exile
• Matilde Romito: Artist straniere a Positano from gli anni Venti e gli anni Sessanta. , published in Territori della Cultura , No. 4, 2011
• Positano: The sweet idleness

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Statistiche demografiche ISTAT. Monthly population statistics of the Istituto Nazionale di Statistica , as of December 31 of 2019.
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Naples. Amalfi Coast. Cilento . Dumont travel paperback, ISBN 978-3-7701-7241-2 , pp. 208ff.
3. ↑ ^{a b} Positano: The sweet idleness
4. ^ Klaus Voigt: Refuge on revocation. Exile in Italy 1933–1945. Volume 1, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-608-91487-0 , p. 447.
5. ↑ Klaus Voigt, Volume 1, pp. 435ff.
6. ↑ Klaus Voigt, Volume 1, p. 437.
7. ↑ Klaus Voigt, Volume 1, pp. 438ff.
8. ↑ ^{a b c} Schede Biografiche (short biographies) , Italian, accessed on October 21, 2015
9. ^ Klaus Voigt, Volume 1, p. 464
10. ↑ Klaus Voigt, Volume 1, pp. 79-80
11. ^ Klaus Voigt: Refuge on revocation. , Volume 2, p. 466
12. ^ Klaus Voigt, Volume 1, p. 157
13. ↑ Messa per gli stranieri al cimitero di Positano ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
14. ↑ Opere (catalog raisonné) ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
15. ^ Positano: dedicato al quartiere Liparlati
16. ↑ La Sezione degli Artisti Stranieri  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.