married, she is guilty of adultery’ (p.175). D’Annunzio’s immorality, the Nietzschean inspiration for many of his novels, was made more serious and dangerous by his abuse of the sacred: ‘In… Click to show full abstract
married, she is guilty of adultery’ (p.175). D’Annunzio’s immorality, the Nietzschean inspiration for many of his novels, was made more serious and dangerous by his abuse of the sacred: ‘In many volumes we find the abuse of the sacred, the profanation of the things of the Church, blasphemy, superstition’ (p.176). In this way, the censors referred back to the first sentence, but widening its reach to the books published after 1911. The response of the Congregazione cardinaliziawas formalized on 28 June 1928; it was at this point that a delicate confrontation between the Holy See and the Italian government took place, even if the Duce had no intention whatsoever of censoring D’Annunzio, a national edition of whose writings was being published. The sentence, as Brera observes, did not have many consequences. Mussolini himself reassured D’Annunzio in a letter: ‘As far as the priests are concerned, don’t worry: I’m going ahead. Besides, even in their field, not everyone shares the Pope’s ideas’ (p.182). The verdicts of the Indice continued after the signing of the Lateran Pacts with D’Annunzio’s last work. But the path had been mapped out in 1911 and widened in 1928. Brera’s book features an important Appendix where themost significant archival documents on which he comments in the chapters of the book are transcribed in their entirety. Readers are invited to consult the censors’ records, notes, judgments and analyses, which give us an exact picture of how Vatican censorship worked. Novecento all’Indice contains many research angles, all of great interest: the book is a significant contribution to knowledge of D’Annunzio’s works, and especially to his reception in the Catholic world, but it is also fundamental for all scholars interested in knowing more about the relationship between State and Church in the 1920s and 1930s, in the shadow of the Concordato. Lastly, the book is an acute, ironic and very precise story of D’Annunzio’s appeal and of the influence of ‘D’Annunzianism’ in the culture and habits of Italy in the twentieth century.
               
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