Queer Places:
Villaggio Verde, Località S. Germano, 16, 28010 Cavallirio NO
Viale Monte Santo, 12, 20124 Milano MI
Bernardino del Boca of the counts of Villaregia and Tegerone, also known as Bernardino di Tegerone or Bernardino Del Boca
(August 9, 1919 – December 9, 2001) was an Italian anthropologist, pioneer of the sexual and homosexual liberation movement in Italy.
Having graduated in architecture in Milan and in anthropology in Geneva, even before the hippies and the Beatles, Count Bernardino del Boca di Villaregia studied and lived for a long time in the East, in particular in Thailand and then to Singapore, where he was consul of Italy until 1952. Initiated into Theosophy and awakened to spiritual reality through an initiation, at the Han temple, he returned to Europe steeped in oriental spirituality and we owe to him the expressions Age of Aquarius and Continuous Infinite Present, and the diffusion of those ideas of universal brotherhood and greater attention to the inner dimensions that run underground both in the first movements of sexual and homosexual liberation of the 1950s, and in the psychedelic movements of expansion of the state of conscience, which starting from the 1970s, converged from the underground to the variegated new age movement that today occupies the scene.
In a letter dated June 15, 1956 sent by Novara to the American homophile magazine ONE, he talks about his book, The long night of Singapore, winner of the Gastaldi National Award in 1951, and the scandal that ensued. Massimo Consoli describes del Boca's commitment in the 1950s as follows: In the early 1950s, Del Boca had met an anarchist, Luigi Pepe Diaz, who published a periodical with a small column on homosexuality, Science and sexuality and convinced him to transform it in Sex and freedom) giving more space to the topic of sex in general, and homosexuality in particular. From the alliance, quite unusual, between the monarchist and the anarchist, the first Italian gay column was born. Soon after, Del Boca even tried to start an Italian publication on the type of the Swiss Der Kreis. The name was even chosen, Tages, inspired by a perennially young Etruscan god, but the attempt failed because the cashier escaped to Greece with all the money advanced by a minister in office. Having vanished the dreams of what could have been the first Italian gay magazine, from February 1955 Futur, speaking of Italy, will only indicate the existence of a delegation at Del Boca himself. When the publisher De Carlo received the manuscript of the Long Night of Singapore, the Christian Democrats had already put him under fire for his other subversive publications, denouncing him at the same time in all over ninety Italian provinces (which has never been done before) and making it fail.
In 1984 he was one of only three intellectuals who agreed to be interviewed on the subject of homosexuality and culture in the book La pagina strappata, published in that year by Giovanni Dall'Orto.
My published books:
