In the memoirs she wrote many years later, Salomé cleared up that during their sojourn on the lake she and Nietzsche spent a few afternoon hours alone on the Sacro Monte, subdued by its spell and unaware of time flowing away. On descending back to the village they had to face her mother’s disappointment and Rée’s as well, both annoyed by their prolonged leave. Nietzsche was a prey to a strange euphoria. Among the baroque chapels on the Sacro Monte a misunderstanding occured that was to lead the hypersensitive German philosopher through one of the most painful crisis of his entire life.

Long after that event, Lou herself was unable to recall whether she had actually kissed Nietzsche, but most certainly she had shared with him no more than a moment of rapture in a spirit of fraternal communion. Yet Nietzsche thought of it in a different way, because he lived for several months in a state of grace like an adolescent yearning for love, until the illusion revealed itself before his eyes. While the letters he wrote in Autumn and in the following Winter are soaked in desperation, in January we already find him attending to the draft of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a cornerstone work in which Nietzsche turns his back to the immanentism of his previous writings and opens the way to an heroic and transcendent, if not religious, ascetism. Such an unexpected turning point in the Nietzschean thought was clearly influenced by his deep-felt love experience, transcended and sublimated, but probably also by the murmurs, scents and pictures of an afternoon spent in the ambience of Franciscan mysticism surrounding the Sacro Monte of Orta.