Ronchey, S., ed. La decadenza. Palermo: Sellerio, 2002.

 “The languor of Decadence or, according to the wonderful title of one of the essays in the volume, ‘the voluptuousness of descent’, is the theme that binds this collection of essays by historians, philosophers, and philologists: Simone Beta, Ginevra Bompiani, Gioachino Chiarini, Daniela Fausti, Alessandro Fo, Mario Musumeci, Alberto Olivetti, Romano Romani, Silvia Ronchey. The authors seek to identify and outline the characteristic elements of that locus of the spirit or that period of cultural history we call ‘decadence’ (the definition depends on point of view) taken from various moments and episodes in time and evaluated from diverse disciplinary perspectives: from ancient Rome that falls to the barbarians to modern, decadent Europe that sees itself reflected in that fall, from the Atlantis of Plato to the Comfortable Thébaïde of Des Esseintes, from Augustine to Walter Benjamin, from Byzantium to a film of the 1920s. ‘In reality’, the editor Silvia Ronchey writes in the introduction to the volume, ‘this work, the outgrowth of a University of Siena seminar conceived to celebrate in a secular manner the passage to the New Millennium, deals more with anti-decadence than decadence. What forms decadence has taken, how we have resisted decadence.’” (from the cover)