Hermann Hesse

Novelist, essayist, poet, and German painter, Hermann Hesse is notably known for his literary masterpieces such as Demian (1919), Siddhartha (1922), Steppenwolf (1927), Narcissus and Goldmund (1930), and The Glass Bead Game (1943). In 1919, following a personal crisis, he moved to Ticino, to Montagnola, above Lugano, where he spent most of his life, obtaining Swiss citizenship in 1924. Enchanted by the landscapes of Ticino - which he saw as the embodiment of the South - by the mild climate, and the magic of colors, Hesse started a series of watercolors (he painted hundreds of them) in the Ticino countryside and wrote numerous poems and short stories. In his narrative Klingsor’s Last Summer (1920), which represents his feelings and creative impulse inspired by the magic colors of the South, he notably describes the beloved exotic garden of his house in Montagnola: “Below him plunged, dizzying, the old garden plunged into shadow, a tangle of dense treetops, palms, cedars, chestnut trees, Judas trees, bloody beeches, eucalyptus, gripped by climbing plants, vines, wisteria.” His passion, but also some more bitter thoughts regarding the transformations that this landscape undergoes over the years, gave rise to numerous texts, collected in the volume Tessin (1980).