IT’S A PASSION FOR some to visit the homes of famous writers, more or less the way visitors to Hollywood fill busses that pass by the homes of celebrities. The thinking must be that if a lawn can reveal the person, a look in the closet might reveal the soul – among other things.

By AUSTIN RATNER [Writers’ Houses] – The little Alpine pensione sits by a lake beside which Nietzsche supposedly did much walking and thinking and the boarding house surprises with its aspect of serenity.  It’s couched in a muting snowfall lying thick on its roof and chimneys, and on the evergreen trees crowded close around and above it.  The two chimneys look like birdfeeders but each has its own personality, and the windows share a general type but also demonstrate some amiable individuality; most are recessed with tidy shutters, except for two to the left of the front door, which are not recessed and bear friezes over them.

One might expect a place visited for months at a time by Nietzsche’s restive spirit to lie in ruins, but that isn’t so. Nietzsche was the fiercest and bravest adversary of self-torment, despair, and suicide in the history of humankind and he wrote parts of his adversarial great works, Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals, in Sils-Maria.  But the time he spent there appears to have been peaceful, even if, according to a Nietzsche Haus curator, children would fill his umbrella with stones so that they’d fall on his head when he opened it.

Continued at Writers’ Houses | More Chronicle & Notices.