„Siehe, der Lenz lacht in den Saal!“: Erbe und Visionen des Freilufttheaters bei D’Annunzio

The idea of creating a theatre in Italy comparable to the Bayreuth Festspielhaus – an idea first proposed by Eugenio Pirani in 1892 – became a veritable obsession for Gabriele D’Annunzio, taking shape in both concrete attempts and fictionalized transpositions. This article reconstructs the sources, imagery, and leitmotifs of the poet’s endeavours, informed by a dialectic of assimilation and critical distance from the Wagnerian model, and in keeping with an ideal of “Latinity”. The projected Festival House on Lake Albano (1897–99), set among the ruins of temples and the wreckage of imperial ships, is read as a symbolic space, where landscape, myth, and national identity converge. This rural, ritual setting was next transformed into the Renaissance-inspired vision of a marble theatre on the Gianicolo in the novel , which culminates in D’Annunzio’s collaboration with the set designer Mariano Fortuny on the construction of a Théâtre de Fête in Paris (1910). The plaster model of the planned theatre shows that the open-air atmosphere was to be recreated by means of a domed covering conceived as a celestial vault onto which lighting effects were projected. The legacy of Bayreuth was thus reframed as an immersive form of theatrical experience, strikingly close to that of cinema.