Ascona

If you walked around in Ascona in 1890, you had a good chance to bump into Piotr Kropotkin. Every righteous anarchist knows this man, because at that time he was the leading figure and theoretician of anarchism. But he was also a geographer and geologist and proved, among other things, that the maps incorrectly reflected the course of the mountain ranges in Siberia .

He came here by Bernhard Mayer, also an anarchist, but also a businessman and art collector. He had a residence in Ascona which he put at the disposal of Piotr Kropotkin. He wanted the weakened Piotr to recover from scurvy he got during his imprisonment in Russia. He wanted to attend a discussion meeting of the Geographical Society on 25 March 1874 about his work on the Ice Age in Finland. Kropotkin was arrested after this meeting. He lost all his teeth due to scurvy. Here in Ascona, Piotr Kropotkin wrote his latest book on ethics. But he would never finish it.