Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and her husband Percy, the Rolling Stones, Grace Kelly, David Niven, Jean Cocteau, Patti Smith... are some of the characters that appear in Seven Days on the Riviera (Cathedral), the journalist's new book and novelist Miquel Molina (Barcelona, 1963), deputy director of La Vanguardia, who takes a tour of both sides of the Riviera, the Italian and the French, following in the wake of those ghosts from the world of creation who passed through places like the forests of the rampant baron of Calvin or towns such as Genoa, Porto Venere, Villefranche-sur-Mer, San Terenzo, Lerinci, Viareggio...
This book has some connection to his Five Hours in Venice (2020) but it is very different...
Both are a journey, but here the spatial and temporal framework is broader. Only the character of Byron is repeated, at a later stage, we find him in love, tired, thoughtful and vulnerable.
He even grants an interview to Lady Blessington.
There was then a certain literary tourism. Byron was famous, and the Englishmen who did the grand tour wanted to meet him on their way through Italy. Depending on how he had his day, he chose to pass by the tourists, to grant autographs, and other times he avoided them. Lady Blessington came to see him in Genoa, she arrived with her husband and some kind of lover – it is not clear if it was his, hers or both. They had a conversation as equals, without sexual tension and she, with very advanced journalism techniques, manages to extract surprising statements from him, in which he manifests his vulnerability, we see a character who has created an aura of curse but who is not .
It not only follows the ghosts of the disappeared, but Patti Smith.
In this case, it is she who seems to follow me there, because I keep finding that she is in places I pass by. The truth is that she has been with me all my life: at the age of 14, I had my first job assembling pens and the first thing I earned I spent on buying her Horses record. She was posting Instagram posts in the same area, and I thought that a good reader, like her, of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Bolaño, perhaps had come, like me, to see where the poet Percy Shelley was shipwrecked.
The water, and the swimmers, are important in this book.
I don't like swimming or the beach but sometimes I accept the sacrifice of doing it, for example to enter Byron's grotto – more like a cleft. There are those who have a different life in the sea than on land. Byron limped and the sea allowed him to feel superior to the rest. For a time he was excessive in his habits but he also had long periods when he was engaged in writing and swimming.
That makes him related to the other protagonists of the book, the Rolling Stones.
Yes, if you see Mick Jagger on stage, you have to admit that, despite the excesses of the past, he must have been eating well and doing yoga for some time. Some romantics live in excess and others only fly over addictions and stuff. There are many links: at the first concert without Brian Jones, Jagger reads Percy Shelley's poem Adonais in honor of him.
Here his Beatrice, Elisabetta, accompanies him only for part of the journey.
The best trip, the one that produces the most sensations and opens you up to unexpected things, is the one you do alone, but if your companion accepts your madness... Literary tourism is entering a state of mental alienation that allows you to see things that actually they are not.
She is more launched.
She would have sneaked into the Rolling house taking advantage of an oversight, although the Villefranche-sur-Mer police would have thrown us out later. I suffer from an excess of prudence and respect for the rules.
There is a moment when we enter a painting.
It was a discovery. I cannot say for sure that the setting that inspired Böcklin's Island of the Dead at the end of the 19th century is the Scola Tower in front of Porto Venere, but there are many similarities.
It also arrives at Mary Shelley's house...
I try to feel the vibrations of the environment, from the entrance of his house, where he went through a very sad moment of his life, devoting himself to publishing the work of Percy Shelley, his poems, instead of cultivating his brilliant career.
And to the Rolling Stones.
In 1971, in Villefranche-sur-Mer, at Villa Nellcôte, they recorded one of their best albums, Exile on Main Street. The main reason for their move to the Côte d'Azur was to seek a more benign fiscal environment, because they were broke, and to detox from the spiral of self-destruction in which they lived. Keith Richards settled in Villefranche-sur-Mer with his wife and his son. Mick Jagger preferred a mansion in Biot, near Antibes. Charlie Watts opted for an inland town several hours' drive away, and the rest spread out to different surrounding towns. They only got together to record the songs in the basement, although they didn't even do that together because they were put in different rooms. It was the only moment in the history of the group in which, instead of Jagger, Richards was in charge.
Secondaries like Tony Sánchez appear there...
English Tony – that's what they called him – has a book about them, I was the camel by Keith Richards (Contra), he was a sinister character, who all he wanted was to sell them drugs and sleep with whoever he could, but who describes the hidden face of the Stones and the world of rock.
About the boy who brought them the cocaine...
Now he is an actor.
Sherryl Crow didn't go there in the end...
In a much later interview, it is clear that he would have liked to be. But the fact is that one thing is the myth of the recording of what for some is their best album, and another is the atmosphere that must have been there, with traffickers from Marseille and Genoa swarming, maybe it wasn't as idyllic as in the photos that Dominique Tarlé did, who was an esthete and whom I interviewed because he knew how to portray the beauty of that and of an entire era.
Whose house is it now?
From a Russian metallurgical businessman who bought it in 2007 for 83 million euros. He also has a yacht, 140 meters long, which he purchased for 240 million dollars.
What books does he have there?
They are examples of the romantic poets of the time, Letitia Elizabeth Landon (LEL), Felicia Hemans, Mary Tighe... They were women who then sold more books than Byron and Shelley and were much more famous.
