Stendhal syndrome: the true story of its birth in Holy Cross

In 1817 the writer Marie-Henri Beyle, known as Stendhal, arrived in Florence and walked through the doors of the Basilica of Santa Croce, leaving in shock. Here is the true story of Stendhal's syndrome.

The true story of Stendhal syndrome

I knewI was ugly, and perhaps that is why I madly loved women and beauty, of which art is the highest sublimation. Everyone knows my History of Painting in Italy, The Charterhouse of Parma, The Red and the Black, just to name a few of my most famous works, but perhaps not everyone knows that my most intimate and secret dream was to become a seducer and triumph over the shyness that literally gripped me, thus satisfying my vanity, I admit, and my love of love.

I had coarse features, my neck dimpled over my shoulders, I was fat, and I knew that I would soon lose my hair and would have to disguise my baldness with a hairpiece. Also, although I was not short, I appeared stocky, with a wide waist and short, thin legs. Therefore, I never tired of obsessively taking care of my appearance and going into debt to the tailor.Elegance had to mask my ugliness, just as the cynicism of the dandy covers the sensitivity of the romantic.

Stendhal's journey from Paris to his arrival in Milan

When I was only sixteen, I arrived in Paris with the firm intention of being a seducer, but for the first time in my life I realized that I was nothing more than an unknown boy who went unnoticed. Filled with disappointment, the next year I enlisted in the First Consul's army that had left for Italy a few days before. Gentlemen, "I was absolutely intoxicated, mad with happiness and joy. Here begins anera of enthusiasm and perfect happiness."

In Milan I remember parties in glittering halls of beautiful and elegant women together with experienced and casual men. I, on the other hand, at the age of seventeen, was proud, shy and inhibited, and out of jealousy of a certain Mrs. Martin, I awkwardly ended up fighting a duel with Alexandre Pétiet, the minister's son, resulting in a slight wound to my foot.

Not content, I threatened to challenge my office manager Joinville as well, again for the same reason: jealousy. I had fallen hopelessly in love with Angela Pietragrua, sister of the famous soprano Giuseppa "Peppina" Borrone Chappuis - "sublime sibyl, terrible in her dazzling and supernatural beauty" whom I ended up portraying in the character of Sanseverina in La Certosa di Parma -, whom also it would not have been too difficult to conquer, but to whom, alas, I was not able to declare myself until a good ten years later. As a result, I lost my innocence in a house of pleasure in May 1801, obtaining a venereal disease as a result.

The Grand Tour in Italy

Years passed, between wars, literary work, prestigious assignments and lightning loves. In September 1811 I returned to Milan and already that evening went to La Scala. The next day I showed up all inflamed with passion by that stunning beauty of Pietragrua, this time determined to make her mine. Banishing shyness, I declared myself openly, and in reply she asked, "Why didn't you tell me then?"

Having obtained the long-awaited victory, I was able to continue my journey in Italy in which I went as far as Pompeii. I tried to understand and love painting, for which I did not have the same insight as for music, and it was in Florence, during long walks along the Arno, that I discovered I had my own taste-perhaps questionable-but what mattered to me was seeing and loving what I looked at.

The first and true Stendhal syndrome

In 1817, on my Grand Tour of Italy, I was in Florence, and as usual I had not been able to refrain from wandering around the center admiring its infinite beauty. I entered the church of Santa Croce, and after a while I began to feel sick. My heart was pounding, I felt dizzy, dizzy. All those works of extraordinary workmanship, so compressed into a limited space, were just too much for an aesthetic lover like me.

"I had reached that level of emotion where the heavenly sensations given by the arts and the passionate feelings meet. Coming out of Holy Cross, I had a heartbeat, life for me had dried up, I walked fearing to fall." These few lines are the first that described what a few years later came to be called the Stendhal syndrome.

Stendhal syndrome or (Florence syndrome) is defined as that psychosomatic affliction that causes tachycardia, dizziness, vertigo, confusion and hallucinations in individuals placed in the presence of works of art of extraordinary beauty, especially if they are compressed into confined spaces (Source: Wikipedia)

Unwanted person in Milan

At the end of July 1827 I returned to Italy. First in Genoa, then for a month between Naples and Caserta, I also visited Ischia and Pompeii, leaving on the wall of the temple of Isis a graffito with my name, which is still visible today. In October I was in Rome, then for two months in Florence, where I frequented Vieussieux, the founder of L'Antologia, in which I tried to get an article published against Cousin, but was opposed by Tommaseo. I met Leopardi and reunited with Lamartine, then first secretary of the French embassy.

After visiting, in Venice, the poet Pietro Buratti and passing through Ferrara, in January 1828 I found myself in Milan, where I applied to the police for a fifteen-day residence permit. Not only was I denied, but I also received an injunction to leave the city immediately as an undesirable person, only because there were insulting expressions against the Austrian government in my work Rome, Naples et Florence . I therefore left Milan to return to Paris. The Austrian authorities then took care, in November 1830, to censor all my publications

Love with Giulia Rinieri de' Rocchi

In January 1830 I received a declaration of love from the Sienese Giulia Rinieri de' Rocchi, of an ancient and decaying patrician family, who had been living in Paris with her guardian for some years. We became lovers, and she was very ready to marry me, but the guardian refused me her hand. We remained lovers for life, however, even after her marriage of interest to cousin Giulio Martini.

For a few years, from 1831 to 1836, I was consul in Italy, a black period in which I went through vicissitudes of various kinds that I do not like to recall. When I returned to Paris, I saw Giulia Rinieri de' Rocchi again, who was residing in our capital with her two children, while her husband-who was pursuing his political career in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and was later minister of Public Education in 1859-had to return to Florence. Unfortunately it lasted only a short time, from August 3 to September 27, 1838. When she left France she wrote to me, "I am leaving and my heart is broken. I am with my heart totally yours."

I saw Giulia again in 1840, in Florence. Together with the painter Constantin we had conceived the project of a guide to the paintings preserved in the city of Rome: Idées italiennes sur quelques tableaux célèbres. The first part was printed in the actual Tuscan capital by the publisher Giovan Pietro Vieusseux.

Les privilèges

I felt that I was getting older. The years and illnesses were beginning to take their toll on me. As I nurtured my sincere love for Giulia, who was my host in Florence at the Palazzo Riccardi, I, who never believed in God, ironically wrote Les privilèges, imagining that the Most High would grant me an instantaneous death, of heart attack, while in life, a constant virility, a healthy and beautiful body, that could make any woman fall in love with me and transform me into any other being. The truth is that to the core I never liked myself.

On March 23, 1842, I left this world in the way I had desired. That God in whom I did not believe had fulfilled me. One of the things that has stuck with me most from my earthly life is Florence, so beautiful that it made me sick, so much so that even today you use the expression "Stendhal syndrome". A beauty that I have always sought in every woman, in every place, in every art, and that I have rarely found so classic and pure as in that city.

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