The remaking of Rome: Cosmopolitanism and literary modernity in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s The Child of Pleasure

From the early nineteenth century onwards, the city of Rome provided both an actual and novelistic setting for European debates about literary and artistic cosmopolitanism. After the Italian unification, Italian writers inherited this tradition while at the same time attempting to reclaim Rome as a setting for a modern Italian (i.e. national) literature. Gabriele D’Annunzio’s novel Il Piacere (1889) was the only one among these attempts to achieve a truly international reputation. D’Annunzio adopted the cosmopolitan perspective on Rome used by foreign writers, imitating their techniques, in order to present modern Italian literature as part of an international economy of borrowing and exchange, a peer to the literatures of more established European nations such as France and Britain. In this process he twisted the geography and social fabric of the city to suit his artistic aims, rewriting Rome as the space for an internationally-oriented Italian modernity