Constructing an event, contemplating ruins, theorizing nature: the Lisbon earthquake and some Italian reactions

Abstract

The consideration of some Italian writings on the Lisbon earthquake allows us to single out three different kinds of reaction to the catastrophe. The very first contemporary reports reflect the process of the construction of an event that, according to Gilles Deleuze, is characterized by extension, intensity and formation of something new. Then, some years after 1755, a new interest in the theme of ruins emerges in the work of Giuseppe Baretti, for whom ruins represent the reference to a past that has to be contemplated in its loss of functionality (following a pattern of perception recently described by Marc Augé). Finally, a third aspect is linked to the materialistic reflection about nature put forward by the nineteenth-century poet Giacomo Leopardi who elaborates his pessimistic conception of nature in a strict dependence on Voltaire's Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne pointing out the antinomy between collective happiness and individual sorrow.