Segnitz is a municipality in the district of

Kitzingen Kitzingen () is a town in the German state of Bavaria, capital of the district Kitzingen. It is part of the Franconia geographical region and has around 21,000 inhabitants. Surrounded by vineyards, Kitzingen County is the largest wine producer ...

Bavaria Bavaria ( ; ), officially the Free State of Bavaria (german: Freistaat Bayern, link=no ), is a state in the south-east of Germany. With an area of , Bavaria is the largest German state by land area, comprising roughly a fifth of the total lan ...

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

, 25 km south of

Würzburg Würzburg (; Main-Franconian: ) is a city in the region of Franconia in the north of the German state of Bavaria. Würzburg is the administrative seat of the ''Regierungsbezirk'' Lower Franconia. It spans the banks of the Main River. Würzburg ...

on the Main river. The village is well known as the home of Renaissance master builder Hans Keesebrod, horticulture and wine and has less than 850 inhabitants.

Italo Svevo, Samuel Spier and Segnitz

Segnitz is especially famous as the village where

Triestine The Triestine dialect ( it, triestino, Triestine: ) is a dialect of Venetian spoken in the city of Trieste. Many words in Triestine are taken from other languages. As Trieste borders with Slovenia and was under the Habsburg monarchy for almost ...

writer

Italo Svevo Aron Hector Schmitz (19 December 186113 September 1928), better known by the pseudonym Italo Svevo (), was an Italian writer, businessman, novelist, playwright, and short story writer. A close friend of Irish novelist and poet James Joyce, Svevo ...

(pseudonym of Ettore Schmitz) and his Brother Adolfo spent almost five school years (May 1874-September 1878) in a private boarding school, called the Brüsselsche Institut (named after its founder, Julius Brüssel *1802–1855). Another Brother, Elio, came to Segnitz 1876-78. In contrast to his brothers, Elio was weak and homesick, but he wrote a diary about his time in Segnitz. This diary is now an important source for the obviously "social" background in Svevo's writing. The Brüsselsche Institut existed in Segnitz from 1838 until 1881. After Brüssel’s early death, it was run by his son-in-law Dr. Louis Eichenberg who brought it to international fame and sold it to Samuel Spier at the height of its importance in 1872. Spier, a teacher and politician, was one of the founding fathers of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. He came to Segnitz after the Franco-Prussian War in a self-imposed exile after he had been accused in the first high treason trial of the newly founded German Empire. He spent seven months in prison, during which he lost part of his sizable inherited fortune, because he could not take care of his business. All of the defendants were eventually only found guilty for a minor offense for which Spier received two months but no compensation for his losses and for being in prison more than three times longer.) Samuel Spier is "Mr. Beer" in Svevo's novella "L'avvenire dei ricordi" ("The Future of our Memories", originally titled by Svevo only by a date, probably the day when he started to write it: 1. 5. 1925) whose action takes place in Segnitz.* Hans Michael Hensel (ed.), John Gatt-Rutter: ''Italo Svevo, Samuel Spiers Schüler. (...)''. Segnitz: Zenos Verlag 1996, 19ff.

References

{{Authority control Kitzingen (district)