“I am the keeper of fragile things and I
have kept of you what is indissolvable.”
—Anaïs Nin

When our guestbook was inaugurated in 2004 within the first hundred days of the site going live we had had posts from  Manchester, Santa Domingo, Gothenburg, Ohio, California and Texas, Chicago and Lima. The post from Lima was from Daniel Saenz More written on Nin’s birthday, February 21, 2004.

Daniel Saenz_More

My grandfather was Ernesto More Barrionuevo, Gonzalo’s brother. The More Barrionuevo family was an important family of artists and journalists in Peru. They were investigators and assistant at movement of Vanguard in Paris and Peru. Gonzalo was married with Helba Huara, and he became to be a great artist, but their works have not come to be very acquaintances because seems that in truth never he interest to do it. Precursor of the postmodernismo? Gonzalo is best known by its romance with Anaïs Nin and its friendship with Paul Eluard and Cesar Vallejo, the great Peruvian poet that wrote the part too important of its work (” Human Poems”) in the atelier of Gonzalo. Nevertheless, Gonzalo was an artist that believed and the art lived on. Even I conserve some letters of Gonzalo in which declares its large dreams to integrate the arts. I hope the day arrive in which we can know the true magnitude of its contribute.

Because of spammers, the Guestbook was forced to close down in 2009. Even though we initiated a number of security and safety measures and had three rotating moderators, the porn and crazed spam messages proliferated and both enraged and saddened our web Amazon being who purged the site daily over morning coffee, carefully allowing the wonderful posts that appeared to be read. Even though the posts couldn’t go live, they still had to be quite literally scraped off each morning anew. Despite Nin’s dictum of when being trapped in destruction, opening a window to creation, alas, our web maven being threw in the towel and went back to enjoying her morning coffee without thinking of the pornographic spammers. We applauded her choice and copied what we could of past messages.

We are sorry we were unable to communicate with Daniel Saenz More in 2004 however, if anyone is interested in contacting him, before we disable the last vestiges of the guestbook, we can send on the email he used almost a decade ago, perhaps the letters he mentioned of Gonzalo’s have been published.

In searching for information on Daniel Saenz More, we found a number of posts (this one below with 604 comments!) from Perutravelnow.com. Perhaps he could be contacted through this site or through Facebook

@Daniel Sáenz More or his other travel writings if indeed this writer’s grandfather was Gonzalo’s brother!

“Regular maps have few surprises: their contour lines reveal where the Andes are, and are reasonably clear. More precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves, of our city, our place, our daily world, our life; those maps of our private world we use every day; here I was happy, in that place I left my coat behind after a party, that is where I met my love; I cried there once, I was heart sore; but felt better round the corner once I saw the hills of Fife across the Forth, things of that sort, our personal memories, that make the private tapestry of our lives.” ― Alexander McCall Smith, Love Over Scotland

As readers of Anaïs Nin know. Anaïs writes effortlessly about her private world maps in her Diaries.

A new site, Luoghi d’Autore writes about this gift in their new blog. We look forward to the upcoming articles on Nin’s experiences in Bali and later, Mexico and Japan.

We relate to the Fez connection. When in Fez staying at Riad 9, we carried Xeroxed copies of her Fez writing and shared with friends we were traveling with-all were enraptured by Nin’s writing and her ability to describe so accurately the labyrinthine nature of the streets we were walking. It was as if she was beside us as a timeless spirit of place guide.

The goal of our new site – Luoghi d’Autore – is to link the world of tourism to the literary  passions of artists known and unknown.  Luoghi d’Autore explores the complex relationship between a place, its landscape, its people, and artists who has chosen a specific destination as  their  ideal place to create a work of art. We believe that the sensitivity of artists provides them  with the ability to describe the spirit of a place. We always look for a connection between a trip  and a literary work, between locales and art. An example is the journey of Anaïs Nin to Bali;  we made the same trip while reading her Diary 7, her article The Spirit of Bali,  and the book A  House in Bali of Colin McPhee (Anaïs Nin loved it); in Sanur we stayed in the same hotel that  Nin had chosen.  It was a very special experience.

We  have  already  published  two  articles  on  her  trip  to  Morocco  (Anaïs  Nin  e  la  magia  del Morocco)and  her  stay in Los Angeles  (Anaïs Nin a Los Angeles:  gli  ultimi anni  raccontati  da Barbara Kraft). We will publish an article about her experiences in Bali and are working on  her trips to Mexico and Japan. We try to discover and describe a place through an artist’s eyes  and to explore the inner world of that artist through the places they visit. The aura of travel is  beautifully  described  by  Anaïs  Nin’s  writing  on  Fez in  Diary  7.  She  writes “The external life  matches or harmonizes with the inner one. Fez did. It matched the dreams, so I was able to unite  them. That is why it is so important to create the outer life to match one’s inner longings, so that  they reach a marriage.”

Emanuela Riverso