ALBERTO SAVINIO’S HOUSE AS A SURREAL PLACE

Abstract

Alberto Savinio (Athens, 1891 – Rome, 1952), the “most foreign” of Italian writers, as Sciascia put it, speaks in his narrative works about the domestic space of his multiple personalities. In his case, this space is manifold and located in different countries, intermittent between the I and the city, felt like an authentic architectural system-labyrinth, but also a labyrinth of mentalities and of human destinies, a space which allows for different experiences situated between the real and the surreal to develop. The house of the infant Savinio described in Tragedia dell’infanzia is a house in Athens, open to the stimuli of the Mediterranean world, different from the spaces in which the later Infanzia di Nivasio Dolcemare takes place. La casa ispirata is situated in Paris, and is inhabited by surreal ghosts, while Casa “la Vita” is the domestic space of a polyvalent artist that becomes an observatory through which one can mercilessly dissect tenants, domestic relationships and those whose world is located primarily in their own city. In his meta-biographical work Narrate, uomini la vostra storia Savinio speaks also about domestic spaces of select characters, crossing personally-known spaces with imaginary ones. The paper presents some of these concrete and different domestic spaces and evaluates them as private or public spaces which accept-reject the multiple I. It is created in peculiar narrative ways innovative for the epoch in which they entered the Italian literature.