The wind of barbarism and the distruction of Villa Ludovisi in Rome

Abstract

The years between 1881 and 1891 were decisive for the young d’Annunzio’s education and his relationship with that cultural and worldly environment of Rome; His refined and communicative style, his worldview and the central nucleus of his poetics began to be forged. His favorite topic: the city of Rome. It is possible to affirm that both d’ Annunzio’s life and works are a true idealization of the world, of a world circumscribed to the dimension of myth: his imagination fought predominantly to impose “elevated” and “eternal” values. of a past seen as an absolute model of life and beauty. The Rome of his novels, as well as that of his journalistic writings, is the Umbertine Rome, a pleasure-loving, refined and lascivious city, in which he denounces the profound limitation and mediocrity of the bourgeois class, as well as the crisis of values ​​and ideals. of the aristocracy. Avant la lettre he established himself as a defender of the city’s historical, artistic and architectural heritage, which in those years was being destroyed thanks to the so-called “construction fever”. This article proposes a cross-reading between his journalistic chronicles and some of his novels which describe the destruction, in the name of progress and modernity, of Villa Ludovisi, one of the most important historical, artistic and landscape heritage sites in the Italian capital.