Classic Beach Life in Italy

by Dr. Michael

Around 1900 the monthly periodical "Die Schonheit" (The Beauty) appeared, at that time edited by Karl Vanselow. It was first to publicly advocate those ideals which are today realized by the FKK German Nudist Organization). It is all the more astounding that already a decade before they had won stature in Italy — thanks to Germans.

The poetess Isolde Kurz, daughter of Hermann Kurz, dedicates a biography in her "Florentine Remembrances" to her brother Edgar, who had died in 1904 in his 51st year. She tells how her brother moved to Florence in 1877, set up practice as a doctor and soon sent for the rest of the family to follow.

In 1889 he created a "surgical poliambulance" together with Dr. Carlo Vanelli, to whom he'd been bound in close friendship since 1881. At the height of his life he established "the pretty summer colony" of Forte dei Marmi on the Thyrrhenic Sea, about which hoick Kurz reports in the following words: "The entrepreneur built himself a summer house on the almost deserted beach at the foot of the wonderful Marble Alps. A group of friends, first among them his Italian collegue, followed his example and in a few year the beach was covered with larger villas, the summer paradise of a circle of beauty.

Even Forte dei Marmi, a little known place before, which had otherwise served as a yard for the shipping of certain marble cargoes, changed its physiognomy and became a bathing resort much visited by foreigners. A great number of the German clients, who didn't want to do without their medical super-vision, followed their medical advisor in the summer vacation! He was strict, however, in his selection and jealously saw to it that no disturbing element crept in, as the wonderful freedom which we all enjoyed there. I too had built a cottage on the beach. It was only possible on the foundation of a higher culture. And on the other hand, only such a strong sense of independence as his, coupled with an equally susceptible sensitivity could create this realization of our childhood dream of the islands of the blessed, where every soul by sun, air, and sea could forget itself, as civilization. The sun bath which Vanzetti introduced long before one became conscious of the meaning of nature and the constraintof warped and distorted thoughts found acceptance in wider medical circles, his remarkable and unpublished studies of the physiology of movement and influence of bodily exercises on character development, the gymnastic games in the open to which he introduced the young people, the emancipation from constraining body damaging costumes, in short, the reawakening of an hellenic ideal of culture toward which humanity elsewhere sighed in vain — found its natural ground here. The two doctors always remained the representatives of this little colony. Whatever outstanding personalities later joined it, their Forte dei Marmi was their creation and this creation bore their stamp."

What shone through this tender paraphrase for the contemporaries is completely clear for us today: that it was literally a life of paradise on the beach at Forte dei Marmi — and the way may be unrivalled in which Isolde Kurz in her description bestows words to its cultural content, as it can hardly even today be more beautifully brought forth.