Abstract
The aim of this essay is to intersect the figures of the collector and the antiquarian with the dynamics of desire, and identify the possible connections between the three themes. Therefore, a thematic and comparative approach was chosen, while the sample text were drawn from the Italian literature of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The textual analysis will reveal the various desires moving collectors and antiquarians in search of the items that make up their collections: greed, pathological need of wealth, fantasies of martyrdom, love, ambition to excel, dreams of omnipotence, libido, jealousy, Illusion of immortality, attraction to the perverse, flâneuristic curiosity. But at the top of this list there is undoubtedly the desire to listen to literature’s description of life.
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