Ascona

And in the end of the 90s, we saw more and more papers showing that, no, indeed, how an ecosystem works, how processes in an ecosystem interlink depends on who is there and how many different tags are there and what traits they have and so on and so on.

And then in the early 2000s, for reasons that I don't recall anymore, I was invited to a workshop in Ascona in southern Switzerland, close to the Italian border.

on does this also hold in aquatic ecosystems? And many people I worked with Thereafter, still our contacts from this workshop.

This has been such an amazing week.

[laughs]

So me and you, I, I'd take you down to, um, Ascona, I think.

Mm.

Which is, like, that's in the Italian part of Switzerland.

It's, it's really well-kept, but it's beautiful and, and it's hot and, and I think, uh, Ernest Hemingway might have written about it in, is it Farewell to Arms? It's a, there's a, it's a book about, um, somebody who deserts during the Second World War-

Yeah

... and hides in Switzerland, they go to Ascona.

And sort of, I think, within that book, there's some descriptions about how beautiful it is, and it is still like that.

The Rocca di Arona had been restored to him by Philip, but we do not hear that he visited it.

It was to Ascona he bent his steps to lay the foundation stone of a college.

A wealthy inhabitant bequeathed his fortune to the sovereign pontiff for that purpose, and Gregory put the matter absolutely in the capable hands of the reforming cardinal.

Accordingly, he laid the foundation stone, the building got on quickly, and was finished within the year.

While at Ascona, Charles heard that the plague had broken out in the neighboring village of Brisago.

He flew there on the wings of self-forgetting charity and remained until the scourge had passed away.

He nursed and consoled the poor sick people, administered the sacraments, and gave such liberal alms that he left himself completely penniless, and he was compelled to borrow money to enable him to return to Milan.

Charles refused, writing that they were not worth printing until they were revised and corrected.

It was one of the Hesse casualties.

In fact, I'll be giving a talk about Hesse later this year in a place called Ascona, which is now an upmarket resort town, but back in the late 19th, early 20th century, it was an anarchist kind of enclave and an early counterculture place.

There was a place called Monteverito, the Mountain of Truth.

So in any case, there's a colloquium there that I'm involved with, and I'll be talking about Hesse, because he lived not far away from there.