"La Città Bella". Note su alcune immagini di Venezia nel Primo Novecento: D'Annunzio, i futuristi e oltre

The paper aims to explore the images of Venice, often contrasting or ambivalent, in Italian literature of the early twentieth century. It retraces and compares D'Annunzio's artistic and biographical experience, the iconoclastic proclamations of the Futurists and their achievements in writing, the representations that the lagoon city finds in Corrado Govoni and Vincenzo Cardarelli. At the beginning there is obviously D'Annunzio and his long bond with Venice: as he first arrived there in the autumn of 1887, and he remained deeply fascinated, until the years spent in the "little red house" on the Grand Canal during the First World War. In the usual mixture of art and life in D'Annunzio, over the years and in the metamorphosis of writing, Venice finds wide and frequent spaces of representation, from the "Trionfo della morte", to "Il Fuoco", to the "Taccuini", just to mention a few titles. The paper then goes on to consider the hyperbolic provocations of the Futurists, starting from the manifesto Contro Venezia passatista. Finally, it retraces the images of the lagoon city given back in some verses by Corrado Govoni, a futurist with divergent thoughts - as in A Venezia elettrica - and in some lyrics by Vincenzo Cardarelli.