Casa Coraggio, Bordighera

Casa Coraggio, facade

Casa Coraggio is one of the historic buildings of the city of Bordighera in Liguria, Italy. 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. MacDonald 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]

MacDonald went to live there with his family in the big villa in Via Vittorio Veneto. The vast living room could host as many 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.[2] All of this made his house an important cultural building in the city and it was named “Casa Coraggio” (Courage House) as a tribute to MacDonald’s motto: “Corage! God mend al”.[3]

After MacDonald died, the house was sold and transformed into the Hôtel de la Reine, which was chosen by Edmondo De Amicis as a winter residence because of its historical links to MacDonald. De Amicis even wrote one of his “Pagine spiritose” in 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.[4]

After the Second World War 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 MacDonald and Amicis[5]

Note

  1. ↑ Sonja Tiernan, Casa Coraggio in Eva Gore-Booth: An image of such politics (2012)
    - Rolland Hein,Casa Coraggio in George MacDonald: Victorian Mythmaker, Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1993
  2. ↑ A visit to Casa Coraggio on MacDonald’s page Archived September 20, 2015, at the Wayback Machine.
  3. ↑ George MacDonald in Bordighera on the Bicknell’s blog
    - Life and death of Edmondo De Amicis on Bordighera’s portal (Italian)
  4. ↑ The death of De Amicis (Italian)
  5. ↑ History of Via Vittorio Veneto (Italian)
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