L'inquieto salotto

Abstract _ The essay analyses the bourgeois parlour as the ‘world theatre’ (the expression is by Walter Benjamin 1955) of the Freudian uncanny or the Unheimlich (Freud 1919). From Victorian age until contemporary era, it is possible to read the History of domestic Interiors as the symbolic space of human anxieties – from time to time generated from belonging to an historical and sociological era –, but also as a precise aesthetical construction, which reveals interiority of its inhabitant. In this way the parlour can be considered not only a cosy refuge, but a solipsistic prison, or a mise-en-scene of artistic objects, or a tribute to an hypothetical future, or a protective bunker in a changing world, or a glacial setting for contemporary art collections. These parlours reflect the uncanny of their epoch, or better the transformations of parlour in the aesthetic value of the Unheimlich by artists, architects and inhabitants. The essay considers different interpreters of uncanny in several ages as Robert Kerr; comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Gabriele D’Annunzio and Carlo Maroni, marquis Luisa Casati; Salvador Dalí, Roberto S. Matta, Paul Nelson, Le Corbusier, Carlo Mollino, Nanda Vigo; Alison & Peter Smithson, Joe Colombo; Radical research of Superstudio, Archizoom and Gaetano Pesce; Luchino Visconti, Herzog & de Meuron.