Böcker av Gabriele D'Annunzio

Le vergini delle rocce, in misura più accentuata dei precedenti romanzi di D'Annunzio, si conforma come un vero e proprio poema in prosa con una trama chiaramente subordinata alla poesia in essa contenuta e con tutti i personaggi (ad eccezione del protagonista) immersi in una fissità atemporale. La poesia raggiunge forse i suoi momenti più alti nelle descrizioni dei paesaggi e degli ambienti naturali che fanno da cornice alla vicenda, emblematici di un Meridione profondo, in cui la vita sembra concentrarsi in una valle appartata dal mondo e dominata da imponenti pareti rocciose. Di fondamentale importanza è lo stile oratorio adottato nel testo, elaborato da D'Annunzio in lunghi mesi di lavoro e considerato dal Vate essenziale per il successo del romanzo, sia in Italia che all'estero (Aonia edizioni).

The setting for his collection of eighteen stories by Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938) was the Adriatic seaport of Pescara and its hinterland in the Italian region of Abruzzo, the author depicting events and personalities from the time of his youth, but also drawing from bygone incidents that were yet memorable in the area's folk history. Pescara may not have had the cachet of celebrated cities such as Venice or Florence, but sympathetically and wryly revealed here by the pen of one of Italy's great writers it lives and breathes with a vitality probably best compared to that of James Joyce's 'dear dirty Dublin'. Indeed Joyce, who admired D'Annunzio, may well have been inspired by the Italian's cameos of small-town life, his parade of saints, voluptuaries and reprobates, their repressions, obsessions, individual dissolutions, collective explosions of anarchy, and their aptness for bizarre behavior that extended from the catatonic to the manic. D'Annunzio came to recognize just how exotic his native region was after he had left it for Rome, where he worked for some years as a journalist and essay writer in the employ of various literary magazines. His Abruzzo articles, and especially those in which he records examples of extraordinary devotional behavior (akin to what Mark Twain was witnessing at that time on the banks of the Ganges), became the basis of the stories in this collection. D'Annunzio was a published poet at the age of sixteen, and his verse has never been absent from the Western Canon since. Something of his painterly style, the layered brushwork of his descriptions, the gorgeous romantic renderings of rural scenes and the moods of the sea, his celebrations of sensuality, his aesthete's fascination with all the possible bodily conditions, from the virginal-voluptuous to the decayed and moribund (he has been hailed as 'the body's poet'), will amaze and delight the reader even in the blandest and most dictionary-dependent translation. The present one is no such, however. Vladislav Zhukov is an experienced translator who has rendered works from four languages into English, including a substantial book of poetry, three volumes of short stories, and a novel (all available on Amazon.com). His knowledge of Italian is that of someone who acquired the language while living in Italy during his youth.

The Child of Pleasure , is many of the old books which have been considered important throughout the human history. They are now extremely scarce and very expensive antique. So that this work is never forgotten we republish these books in high quality, using the original text and artwork so that they can be preserved for the present and future generations. This whole book has been reformatted, retyped and designed. These books are not made of scanned copies of their original work and hence the text is clear and readable.

General Gabriele D'Annunzio, Prince of Montenevoso OMS CMG MVM (12 March 1863 - 1 March 1938) was an Italian poet, playwright, orator and journalist and soldier during World War I. He occupied a prominent place in Italian literature from 1889 to 1910 and later political life from 1914 to 1924. He was often referred to under the epithets Il Vate ("the Poet") or Il Profeta ("the Prophet"). D'Annunzio was associated with the Decadent movement in his literary works, which interplayed closely with French Symbolism and British Aestheticism. Such works represented a turn against the naturalism of the preceding romantics and was both sensuous and mystical. He came under the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche which would find outlets in his literary and later political contributions.