Early one morning in 1959 a ceramic artist from Turin known simply as Clizia arrived in Bussana Vecchia, a medieval hilltop village about five miles northeast of Sanremo that had been a complete ghost town for 72 years.
On Feb. 23, 1887 a devastating earthquake flattened the hamlet, knocking off the roofs of its two churches and reducing all stone buildings to rubble. The survivors headed for safer ground in the valley below, where they founded Bussana Nuova.
Bussana Vecchia, 80 miles northwest of Genoa, was an absolute ruin.
That morning in 1959 Clizia was nonetheless determined to settle in the shattered village, turning a derelict house into his nest. And soon he began holding art camps in summer.
The craggy ruins of the abandoned town spilled out around the art students. They were seated with 360-degree views of the rolling foothills, the scent of the sea filling the air. The priceless setting between the Ligurian Sea and the Alps remains intact today.
At the time. there was no electricity in the village, no tap water or sanitation, but the light was perfect for artists. They came by the dozens that year and the years ahead in the ’60s: painters and sculptors, ceramists, musicians and poets, all part of an unusual experiment – an artists’ colony.
Soon Clizia and a handful of others were sketching plans for what in 1964 was named Il Villaggio Internazionale degli Artisti with its own constitution nourished by the counterculture spirit.
It was their way of letting the outside world know the artists had arrived. The hippie community stimulated both the creativity of individual artists and the economy of this sleepy corner of Liguria. Artists continued to revitalize Bussana Vecchia in the ensuing years while the anomalous village itself stirred the artists, many of them from cities all over the world.
Even though times have changed and problems escalated, for some artists in the colony life is still truly intellectually exciting. “Yes, certainly it is,” says painter and sculptor Colin Wilmot, one of the founders of the Villaggio Internazionale degli Artisti.
“The richness of the village is that there are both people who live here all the year and others who have to be in New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam and various other European countries in order to do what they do,” says Mr. Wilmot. He refers especially to British visual artist Daniel Harvey and composer Francis Shaw.
“So there is a continual exchange of ideas from outside the village,” Wilmot says.
Born in England in 1940, Wilmot spent his childhood in Singapore. He moved to Bussana Vecchia in 1966.
“I was a painter and the light here was and is perfect for painting,” he says. “The village offered an opportunity to make a space for me to both live and work. The idea of bringing an abandoned, ruined village to life again and exclusively for creative people was very exciting, and very much in line with the thinking and ideals of the 1960s.”
Today the distinctive, almost magical village of about 100 residents means a lot to him. “It is my home, my place of work and the source of my income,” he says.
But there have been periodic confrontations with the authorities over the decades. Last December the Bussanesi panicked when they received tax notices for tens of thousands of euros from the Demanio, the Italian Department of State Property, calling them illegal occupants. Each artist’s house or studio was carved out of wreckage.
“Our houses are safe,” says ceramist Daniela Mercante, resident of Bussana since the ’80s. “Household accidents never happened here. We secured and restored our homes, taking care only to preserve the pockmarked exteriors that lent the village its ruined charm,” she says.
Wilmot doesn’t know if Bussana’s inhabitants will be protected in the end. “I really do not know. The present situation is very worrying and costly as lawyers have to be paid to defend us,” he says.
But he believes that the international community can do something for them.
“The international community can bring pressure to bear on the various authorities and point out the injustice of our situation,” Wilmot says. “We have cleared rubble and restored the village at our own expense, generated a lot of publicity, and been of both cultural and material benefit to the region.”
You arrive on foot in Bussana Vecchia. There are no parking lots and the streets have no lights. “In wintertime some leave. It is harsh with no heating system,” says Daniela.
The two local churches are still gutted, creating a strangely appealing setting.
The postman does not enter the village. He puts mail in the residential mailboxes that hang on a giant wall at the hamlet’s entrance.
“To me Bussana Vecchia is like Macondo, the imaginary utopian town invented by Garcia Marquez in ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’,” says painter and musician Silvano Manco, a resident since 1979. “You find your personal rhythm to your day, away from the global rhythm. We are so close and yet so far from the surrounding reality. This place has always mesmerized me. You feel you are travelling without moving,” he says.
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