Dark Tourism & Villas, book progress

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Hello again subscribers!

Not that much to report this time. Yesterday the Blog post “Dark Tourism & Villas” went up, the theme decided on in our recent second poll.

It covered first Villa Grande in Oslo, Norway, once home to Vidkun Quisling (yes, that Quisling who gave the English language the generic expression “a quisling”), followed by Villa Torlonia, formerly the residence of Benito Mussolini in Rome during Italy's fascist years. Next came Villa Grimaldi, the principal detention and torture centre in Santiago de Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Not a villa in name but also a grand and outwardly pretty building featured next: the House of the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, Germany, the venue of surely the most sinister “business meetings” in history. Here some top Nazis convened under the chairmanship of Reinhard Heydrich to discuss the implementation of what they cynically called the “final solution of the Jewish question”, i.e. it was at this conference that it was decided to use gassing on an industrial scale, to take place in purpose-built death camps, to systematically exterminate the millions of Jews captured by the Nazis and put in ghettos and concentration camps. A villa, now a ruin, that has dark associations of a different sort, was Casa Caoba in the Dominican Republic – once the favourite mansion of the country's former dictator Rafael Trujillo, who not only ruled with an iron fist from 1930–1961, was thoroughly corrupt and racist, but also a serial rapist. He had scores of often underage girls delivered to his bedroom at Casa Caoba to “feast” on them. Less dark was the next villa, located in Dresden, East Germany, which used to be Vladimir Putin's residence during his years as head of the KGB back in the GDR era. And the post finished with a pretty image of a wooden villa in Valparaiso, Chile, which is allegedly “haunted” because some murder took place inside. I don't personally believe in ghosts or haunted houses, but thought it was a pretty picture to finish the post with – that's why I picked it serve as the lead pic here (above right).

I could have added yet more villas, a few more actually sprang to my mind, but I thought that those six formed a good enough selection for the post.

I also had to limit my efforts in composing new posts, because my main priority currently has to be the work on the proofs for my book (working title “The Atlas of Dark Destinations”). But I am happy to report that this is proceeding well and that the proofs look very, very promising indeed. It is going to be a smashing tome, I can confidently say already. But it's still a lot of work, ironing out little errors and inaccuracies and amending and updating some text. When I'm done with that, hopefully before the end of this month, I have to write up the introduction and query a few photo clearances, and then the book will go back to the publishers for further proofing (they are very thorough and professional!), repro, and eventually to the printers. All that takes time. The current estimated publication date is in October 2021. So we have to be patient.

In the meantime I will hopefully be able to catch up on blog posts and, even more crucially, some very overdue additions to my main website, not just about my recent trips to Brno, Venice and Switzerland, but also some even more overdue chapter updates for Poland, France and Belgium, some going back four years (e.g. all the World War One sites I visited back in 2016 and still haven't got round to writing up about properly – so my yet-to-be-published book is currently more up to date than my website!).