As you know my biography of Angelica Balabanoff ‘The Strange Comrade Balabanoof: The Life of a Communist Rebel‘ has been published in June by McFarland Publishers. To celebrate the launch of the book I decided to devote my blog to Angelica’s lifestyle, friends, recipes and places where she lived during her long and interesting life. After laborious preparations I have finally managed to go to Switzerland for a one-week trip at the end of September. I have dreamt about it for years. Angelica spent quite a few years in Switzerland first in 1903-1906, then again later in 1918. She came to live in St Gall after graduating from the Sapienza university in Rome. The objective of her stay in town was to help the Italian immigrants who worked in St Gall in the textile industry. Most of them did not speak German, were unerpaid, lived in dreadful conditions and needed someon who could help them out and represent them. Switzerland beeing an expensive place to visit – my trip was not easy to arrange and I took time to prepare it. I wanted to visit as many places related to Angelica’s life as possible. Obviously I could not miss St Gall – a town in the North Eastern part of Switzerland where she had her baptism by fire as a speaker in 1903. St Gall was named after its first citizen an Irish monk Gallus, whose statue can be seen on the central square, also named after him. As a place to […]
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