The Child of Pleasure

The Child of Pleasure (written in 1888 and published in 1889) and its protagonist Andrea Sperelli introduced the Italian culture of the late 1800s to Aestheticism and a taste for decadence. Sperelli is a young count, who - like Joris Karl Huysmans' Baron Des Esseintes or Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray - following family tradition, seeks beauty and despises the bourgeois world; leads an extraordinary life, which he lives as a work of art; and rejects the basic rules of morality and social interaction. However, this extraordinary sensitivity also implies a certain corruption, evident in his sadistic superimposing of the two women: Elena Muti and Maria Ferres.