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“I do not have a manor house; / nor have I lost it; / my mother has given birth to me
throwing me towards the world. / Now I am alone in the world and every time /
I go further into the world (…) and I have everything, alone”.
(Rainer Maria Rilke, The Last One, 1906)

The Rilke that the reader will find in this book is a traveller Rilke. The seven essays collected in the volume – written by some of the most notable European specialists – situate us in each of the cities where the poet spent time and where something crucial to his life and work was revealed. In Prague (the city where he was born and lived an unhappy childhood) he discovered that the creative act of the word was possible; in Florence, the art of learning to look; in Paris, thanks to Cézanne, how to overcome the immobility facing the perishable; in Moscow, the mysterious homeland of his instincts that would never abandon him; in Toledo and Ronda, a spiritual shelter in the midst of a creative crisis, and in Munich, the antechamber of an exile that would lead him to Switzerland, where he lived until the end of his days. There, now a hundred years ago, he finished his Duino Elegies, which gave the pilgrimage to understand what Europe was and what it could have become a final meaning, crossing cultures, countries and languages.

Authors: Carolina B. García-Estévez (Prague), Gerhard Wolf (Florence), Franco Rella (Paris), Thomas Schmidt (Moscow), Antonio Pau (Toledo), Francisco Jarauta (Ronda) and Ulrich Bauer (Munich).

PAPERBACK. 313 pp
151 illustrations. 14 x 21 cm
ISBN: 978-84-949650-4-3