The author’s name is hidden anagramatically in the protagonist’s first name; ‘Dolcemare’ is the mythic and sacred place where his childhood was lived, the marine landscape of Greece. But the author’s name is itself a borrowed one, adopted to escape the burdensome kinship of an illustrious brother, the painter Giorgio de Chirico. The play on names is full of significance for Savinio; also for the young Nivasio, who is surrounded by characters whose names sound like distorted words, satirical and suggestive: Father Visanio (another play on Savinio), Signora Trigolina (‘Big Mullet’), Doctor Naso (‘Nose’)...It is through these names that we see the child’s struggle against the adult state, his rejection of its ways and its ridiculous complacency which he challenges by his fantastic, metaphysical adventures.


Childhood of Nivasio Dolcemare is a record of the anxieties of childhood sexuality, its death-wish and prepubescent angst; childhood recorded neither as comedy nor drama but as a tragedy of sacrifice and self-abasement that the language turns into a play on words. It is also an exemplary tale of suffering, lack of understanding, solitude and sensuality, a hangar full of luminous and illusory pleasures in which the boy Nivasio incubates his scorn for the adult world, his realisation of the ‘inferiority of others’ from which he naturally develops ‘a distinct superiority complex’ and asserts:

‘Destiny predisposed him to overcome the defects of his family, his caste, his race. And not only the defects, but the merits as well. He foresaw that he would someday reach this form of supreme freedom. He was already modelling himself on the image of the Hard and Solitary Man, the Man of Diamond, a fusion of Achilles and Orlando, the walking Man of Stone.’ pp39-40