The Holiday Trilogy: summary, themes and analysis of the three comedies with which Goldoni harshly criticizes the Venetian bourgeoisie.
With Smanie per la villeggiatura , Goldoni inaugurates a significant trilogy around the “crazy preparations”, the “crazy conduct” and the “painful consequences” caused by having a standard of living that was above the norm and more expensive than one’s means, which was precisely the one undertaken by the Venetian mercantile bourgeoisie , of which Goldoni’s cycle is a faithful mirror. Between jealousies, passionate loves, waste and dissipation, Goldoni minutely describes three different moments of bourgeois vacationing. Not new to operations of this type (it had already happened with La Putta onorata and La Buona moglie), the Venetian playwright conceives at the same time the idea of three consecutive comedies.
The Holiday Trilogy: Summary
Goldoni’s holiday trilogy is divided as follows:
- The first: The longing for the holidays ;
- the second: The adventures of the holiday ;
- the third: The return from the holidays ”.
Unlike the previous ones, which were justified by their good public success, with these comedies Goldoni wants to give us a more general image of his criticism of society: in the same years in which he elaborates and composes the satire of the Venetian bourgeoisie, with I Rusteghi and La Casa nova, Goldoni seems to reach the peak of his analysis of the class of enriched and ambitious merchants, and inevitably return to the popular soul of the lower classes, as in fact happens in the contemporary Baruffe chiozzotte.
The Holiday Trilogy: Analysis
The rise of an ambitious and frivolous social class is broken down by Goldoni in the trilogy of the holiday and, in a sort of vicious circle, condemned by its own presumption, by the egoisms, by the moral contradictions that it expresses. Goldoni manages to combine the social background (the family sphere with marital disagreements and the tantrums of lovers) with the moral implications of the bourgeois crisis.
- In Smanie, it is the departure for the long-awaited holiday in the countryside that sets the pace of the comedy, amid financial turmoil, romantic revenge and worldly ambitions;
- in the Adventures it is the protagonist Giacinta who attracts the spectator’s attention, due to a rich psychological complexity with which Goldoni represents her on a par with his other great female figures;
- In The Return the tensions ease, the characters become closer and the wedding marks a happy ending which, however, does not erase the shadows of a larger and irreversible crisis.
