Il Sublime in Sicilia

[automatically translated] In the same years in which this concept is an amazing processing field in France and in England the Sublime ascends to the aesthetic category rank, in Sicily. Between the end of the seventeenth century and the early years of the next century, especially in the field of baroque festivals, many authors make use of the oxymoronic formula "horror beloved" to describe the effect that the spectacle of pyrotechnic machines - themselves iconic embodiment of the notions the "colossal" and "ephemeral" - produced on the viewer. The paper analyzes, from a plurality of contemporary sources, the conditions in which (albeit episodically and extent of all implied) Sicily took part in the delineation of an "aesthetic culture" aligned with the most prestigious European outcomes.