Villa Diodati
The Villa Diodati is an estate in Cologny on Lake Geneva .
history
It was acquired in 1710 by Gabriel Diodati, a descendant of Giovanni Diodati , and given a mansion (Villa Belle Rive). It was here in 1816 that Mary Godwin , the romantic and Mary's later husband Percy Bysshe Shelley , the English poet Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) met his pregnant ex-lover Claire Clairmont (Mary's half-sister) and the doctor and writer John Polidori . The villa had been rented by Lord Byron because he (erroneously) believed that John Milton had visited the family of his childhood friend Charles Diodati there in 1638. Since then it has been an important site in literary history.
1816 went down in history as the year without a summer , as the global climate was disturbed due to the eruption of the Indonesian volcano Tambora in 1815. Because of the extremely bad weather, the friends could often not leave the house.
In addition to the excessive consumption of laudanum , they devoted their time to debating political, philosophical and spiritualistic questions. Occult phenomena soon became the main topic of their nightly conversations, including Erasmus Darwin's attempts to bring dead matter to life. Since the group liked to read from German ghost tales, Byron finally suggested that everyone should come up with such a story for themselves.
The story of Frankenstein ( Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus with a leitmotif from John Milton's Paradise Lost ) sprang from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's pen , while Percy Shelley and Lord Byron drafted a dark narrative that remained fragmentary. John Polidori named his work The Vampire , which he finished later, but was influenced by Byron's work and the eponymous hero of his story, Lord Ruthven , was even equipped with Byron-like features. This work was ultimately the trigger for the literary vampire fever, which also brought about Bram Stoker's Dracula .
Both the events at Villa Diodati and Mary Shelley's story were interwoven by Brian Aldiss in 1973 in his novel "Der unleashed Frankenstein" (originally "Frankenstein Unbound"). This story served Roger Corman as inspiration for the film "Roger Cormans Frankenstein" in 1990 .
The meeting was filmed in 1986 by Ken Russell as Gothic with Gabriel Byrne , Julian Sands , Natasha Richardson and Timothy Spall .
From 1945 to 1946 the family of the painter Balthus lived in the Villa Diodati .
Web links
- Micheline Tripet: Diodati. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
Coordinates: 46 ° 13 ′ 13 " N , 6 ° 11 ′ 0" E ; CH1903: 503,142 / 119535