La fortuna dell’Estetica del 1902 in Italia

The paper focusses on the influence exerted by Croce’s Estetica of 1902 on the Italian culture. The first paragraph is devoted to the reviews and translations that appeared immediately after the publication of the book. However rich in number, both reviews and translations were not essential for the fortune of the volume. Much more important was the application and popularization of Croce’s ideas through the essays on Italian contemporary literature Croce himself wrote in his journal «La Critica» during the years 1903-1914, and which were often published also in newspapers of the time.The other parts of the paper analyse the influence of Croce’s first aesthetics on literary criticism of other scholars, on art and musical criticism, and on philosophical aesthetics. In the last field, that of philosophical aesthetics, the influence was relatively scarce, while Croce had an enormous influence on art and literary criticism during the first fifty years of twentieth century.