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Il trionfo della morteIl trionfo della morte (Triumph of Death) is a novel by Gabriele d'Annunzio. It belongs to the cycle "The Romances of the Rose".

Plot
Cathedral of Guardiagrele
The story is set in the Abruzzo region, the birthplace of the author. The noble aesthete Giorgio Aurispa, besotted with his unhappily-married lover Ippolita, leaves Rome after witnessing a suicide. After a brief interlude with Ippolita in Albano, Giorgio receives a telegram from his mother, who lives in the small mountain village of Guardiagrele. Giorgio arrives in the beautiful city of stone, and is fascinated by the sculptures; however, he is equally haunted by popular superstitions and the memories of the suicide of his uncle Demetrio, whom he had loved as a father. Worse, Giorgio discovers that his actual father has squandered the family fortune, forcing his mother and siblings to live in poverty while he carries on with a prostitute. Giorgio curses his father, abandoning his family, and runs to the sea, buying a house on a hill in San Vito Chietino. Ippolita joins him, and the two pursue a summer of decadent languor marred only by Giorgio's developing paranoia towards her.

Trabucco of San Vito Chietino Giorgio is additionally obsessed with death, and matters only become worse after the pair undertake a pilgrimage to the shrine of Casalbordino, where the multitude of desperate supplicants begging cures of the statue of the Madonna drives them away in horror. While Giorgio becomes more and more unmoored and desperate to leave both Abruzzo and what he perceives as Ippolita's unwholesome influence, she remains amused and fascinated by their surroundings. Finally Giorgio decides that his only recourse is to carry her over a seaside cliff, killing the both of them.

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