Public Facility Valposchiavo

Devon House (Station 1 Rundgang Hildesheimer)

Devon House in Via dei Palazzi
Devon House in Via dei Palazzi

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Devon House in Via dei Palazzi
The Devon House in Via dei Palazzi is the first stop on our tour. Built in 1863 according to the plans of the Italian architect Giovanni Sottovia (1827-1892) for Pietro Pozzi, an emigrant who became very wealthy as a confectioner in Porto, the house came into the possession of the Semadeni family in 1908, another emigrant family that ran a successful coffee house in Ilfracombe in the southwest English county of Devon.

Beschreibung

Wolfgang Hildesheimer and his wife were immediately taken with the pretty palazzo:

"Of course, we haven't quite decided yet, but we are now starting negotiations with the owner. After all, we don't risk anything if we try it out [i.e. the apartment] - even if only for a few months at first. .... In any case, we are now in contact, not only with the owner of the house (a very pleasant young man who was born in England), but also with the drugstore owner, who is the chairman of the tourist office and was very open to our plans." (1)



Wolfgang Hildesheimer and his wife lived on the mezzanine floor of Devon House from 1957 to 1961. The house plays an important role in Wolfgang Hildesheimer's prose work Tynset, for which he was awarded the Büchner Prize and the Bremen Literature Prize. The book is the monologuing reflections of a first-person narrator on a sleepless night. Not only the narrator's living conditions are strongly reminiscent of Hildesheimer, but also the house in which the first-person narrator moves is clearly inspired by Devon House. Who the model for his very pious but drunken housekeeper Celestina is, we won't reveal here.



"It's still too early to walk through the house, that will come later when I still can't sleep later. I save, I put off my nocturnal actions. So later I will get up and walk through the house.


I get up several times at night and walk through the house at least once, I cross the large wooden room next door, in which there is nothing but a large accumulated break and now and then the wooden noise and the splashing of a fountain, walk through the library, at whose bookshelves I stay or not, enter the stone staircase ...


... and in the back shed, the cyclopean room, where the aromatic herbs hang to dry in summer and autumn, Here it smells good. I climb up to the telescope or not, leave the shed, enter the kitchen or not, go up the stairs, I look into the four rooms on the first floor, in one of which stands my monstrous summer bed.


This is where I sleep in summer, elevated, sublime and airy, in an emptiness surrounded by wood and rustling with silence, so this is the starting point of my summer night walks, in winter I rarely stay here, usually I choose another room, one full of objects, and descend the stairs again. I never go higher up, not at night.... because there is only one room left at the top, that is Celestina's chamber, which I do not enter. From downstairs I hear her snoring inside, or I don't hear anything, which means that she is sitting in front of a bottle of red wine or lying in bed with her and drinking. Or I hear her murmur, which means she's praying."



Sources:
(1) Letter to the mother, August 1956.
(2) Tynset, Frankfurt am Main, 1965, p. 19ff.

Karte

Devon House (Station 1 Rundgang Hildesheimer)

Verantwortlich für diesen Inhalt Valposchiavo Turismo.
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