 Much of the writing for his thesis was completed in 1924 on the Italian island of Capri, where Benjamin had retreated for financial reasons. The stay would prove decisive, however, since it was here he met the Bolshevik Latvian theatre producer Asja Lacis, with whom he begun an erotically frustrated but intellectually productive relationship. ‘Naples’ was jointly written with Lacis in 1925, whilst One-Way Street, a quasi-constructivist collection of fragments written between 1923–1926 and dedicated to Lacis on its publication in 1928, and the unfinished Arcades Project, begun in the late 1920s, both exhibit a modernist experimentation with form that can in part be attributed to Lacis’ influence. His Marxist turn towards historical materialism was compounded by his enthusiastic study of Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness whilst on Capri and a visit to Lacis in Soviet Moscow in the winter of 1926–7.