The Hopeless Geometry of Giorgio de Chirico’s Brother: Alberto Savinio’s Literary Fugue
Giovanni Papini once declared, “he who creates another reality is no longer a chronicler of this world, but the architect of his own cosmos.” Few writers illustrate this adage more seamlessly than Alberto Savinio (1891–1952), the polymathic sibling of the better-known surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico. Born Andrea Francesco Alberto de Chirico, Savinio was a writer, painter, musician, stage designer, and thinker whose oeuvre defies tidy classification. Though often overshadowed by his brother, his contributions to 20th-century literature and aesthetics form a unique philosophical edifice — wry, labyrinthine, delicately deranged.
Born in Athens into an aristocratically haunted Italian-Greek household, Savinio was a prodigy in music, performing publicly as a pianist by age twelve. Yet, by his early twenties, he renounced the concert hall in favour of the written word, convinced that music’s invisible architecture could be translated into prose and theatre. His earliest writings appeared amidst the fermentation of Modernist movements in Paris, where he stood on the periphery of circles that included Apollinaire, Max Jacob, and Jean Cocteau. In 1914, alongside his brother Giorgio and Guillaume Apollinaire, he contributed to the foundation of Metaphysical Art, a visual and conceptual gesture toward unworking reality, pushing it into a dimension of semantic estrangement.
Savinio’s aether-bound projects — novels, mythic remixes, autobiographical deliriums — are primarily confined to Italian. Among the most significant are “Hermaphrodito” (1918), “Tragedia dell’infanzia” (1937), and “Achille innamorato” (1938). These works blend grotesque comedy with piercing insight into classical myth, family trauma, and metaphysical longing. His theater fragments and stories, meanwhile, tend toward vigilant absurdism. In “The Lives of the Gods” (1941), the Olympians become neurotic bourgeois relics: Apollo obsesses about his cholesterol; Athena presides over an empty salon, babbling politely into oblivion. It is here one begins to decode Savinio’s unique voice — a soft heretic of myth, lashing the divine with a pillow.
Yet it is in “Hermaphrodito” that Savinio first sketches the philosophical helium that will lift his later work. Written as a series of dreamlike vignettes, the book refigures identity as processus — fluid, orchestral, and destabilising. In one passage he writes, “Io sono l’oro del sogno. Il resto è minerale della veglia.” (“I am the gold of dream. The rest is the mineral of waking”)[1]. We are not simply bodies but motifs — harmonic possibilities — echoing vaster patterns of unseen estate. For Savinio, the self is no more than an orchestrated hallucination, a musical theme that stutters between octaves.
This vision of reality as polyphonic — and deranged — permeates his writing. The world of Savinio is a carnival staffed by demiurges with ulcerative colitis. He doesn’t satirize so much as invert, dissolving givens into existential pudding. In “Tragedia dell’infanzia,” a semi-autobiographical work exploring his youth, the child narrator enacts an ontological rebellion. “Chi comanda qui?” he asks not of his family but of being itself. “Penso che il mondo menta. Ma ho bisogno del suo inganno per orientarmi.” (“I think the world lies. But I need its lie in order to orient myself.”)[2] So the very fabric of the real is both stage and veil, not to be unmasked, but to be seen as costume — fraying at its imperial seams.
A reader familiar with Kafka or Borges may be disappointed to find less clockwork dread in Savinio’s stories — less taut, rhythmic negation. Instead, they will find a gleam of childlike cruelty, akin to Alfred Jarry or Raymond Roussel. His theatre is populated by semi-divine failures, each transfixed by their own inadequacy. A constant motif is the collapsed horizon — a world that has outlived its own imagination. From this compost of post-mythic emptiness, Savinio seeks a new way of seeing. He does not philosophise from the mount, but instead converses drunkenly with shadows in the vestibule of the Temple.
Why, then, do we return to Savinio now? Perhaps because his vision — fractured, playful, antic and persuasive — offers an antidote to ideological monotony. In an age increasingly obsessed with narrative coherence, Savinio insists on the legitimacy of contradiction-as-being. In “Achille innamorato,” a reimagining of the Iliad under the influence of psychoanalysis, ecstasy, and cough syrup, the godlike warrior Achilles is rendered helpless by love. “Il cuore di Achille è una tastiera rotta che suona solo note stonate” — “Achilles’ heart is a broken keyboard that plays only off-key notes.”[3] We are left not with the hero, but the noise of his psychological fallout — as if Greek myth, having swallowed Freud, now vomits him back into Tragedy, but in a minor key.
There is a parcel of old-tin hope in this, a wounded invitation. Savinio is not trying to build another edifice of reason; he is, rather, retreating through its wreckage, playing oboe among the ruins. And perhaps that, too, is a kind of architecture — not of stone, but of memory, mockery, and mercy.
Permit a pause for a more personal feint: I first encountered Savinio in an overcast library near Utrecht, his name unfamiliar and his prose half-dissolved by mildew. Yet in the hour that passed reading “Souvenirs,” a collection of feuilletons, I felt as though I’d entered the old city of pre-verbal thought — a zone between claim and dream. The phrase that arrested me — “La geografia del ricordo è un paesaggio senza nome” (“The geography of memory is a landscape without name”)[4] — has since sailed behind most of my reflections like a rogue planet. Indeed, to read Savinio is to leap through fog and name each cloud a god.
If one must end this excursion anywhere, let it be here: Savinio, though nominally a Modernist, believed that ancient chaos, not progress, was the key terrain. Even his most self-assured claims are queasy with irony, tipping always toward tragic laughter. His was a poetics of the incomplete design, of song unfinished — the fugue abandoned mid-fabrication, the myth retold with inverted chorus. And this, perhaps, is his true legacy: a literature unwilling to let truth cohere, insisting instead on a spectral music, veering between the divine and the grotesque, smiling not because it knows, but because it suspects no one does.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, myth, Savinio
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[1] Savinio, Alberto. *Hermaphrodito*. Milan: Casa Editrice, 1918, p. 27.
[2] Savinio, Alberto. *Tragedia dell’infanzia*. Il Saggiatore, 1959, p. 56.
[3] Savinio, Alberto. *Achille innamorato*. Adelphi, 1973, p. 112.
[4] Savinio, Alberto. *Souvenirs* in *Narratori delle Teste Perdute* (Collected Writings), Einaudi, 1986, p. 194.