The love story between Nietzschean ‘superman’ poet and musician Stelio Effrena and ageing actress La Foscarina (the literary counterpart of the great Eleonora Duse) unfurls beneath the symbol of fire, creator and destroyer of life. The backdrop to the couple’s passionate affair is the city of Venice, which, described in autumnal colours of mists and sunsets as an enchanting city of decadence, ruin and death, almost becomes a character itself in this story. In the slow and implacable disintegration of the city La Foscarina sees her own old age sneaking up on her, while Stelio Effrena anticipates the idea of the death of art — supplanted by utilitarian logic in the new world of the bourgeois.


The Flame can be read as a tale of passion or as an aesthetic debate on the future of art, but it is above all a portrait of Stelio Effrena: the Commander, the image-maker, he who knows no bounds, ruling everything and rejecting everything, indifferent to the pain he causes, living up to his motto ‘create with joy’. His driving force is a fire which burns as it creates, transforming the world’s degeneracy into art. Whereas Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach collapses amid the death and decay of Venice, Effrena accepts the same conditions as a challenge: salvation comes through fire that, as in Venice’s Murano glassworks, purifies material and regenerates it, rescuing it from the clutches of corruption.

‘Stelio quivered as though she had unexpectedly touched him. Once again the expressive power of her prophetic lips aroused an ideal image from some indefinable depths that rose up as though from a tomb before the poet’s gaze, and took on the colour and breath of life... It was an apparition of fire, bolder and more dazzling than that which had lit up the harbour of San Marco, a flaming life-force, flung from the deepest womb of nature towards the expectant throng, a vehement zone of light erupting from an inner sky to illuminate the most secret depths of human desire and the human will, a word that has never been spoken, come from primeval silence to express all that is eternal and eternally unsayable in the heart of the world.’ p90