Word: otranto
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...Reluctant Saint. Little Giuseppe Desa was a miserable child. He was born in a mean village near Otranto, Italy, in the year 1603. His mother treated him "with great severity," and the child, sickly and confused, wandered about with dazed eyes and slack lips, understanding little, forgetting even to eat. The villagers called him Boccaperta, The Gaper, and considered him an idiot...
...Beau Brummell dressed for future ages, or Lucullus dined, Walpole peered into corners. But he had, too, his more special, often laborious pursuits: Strawberry Hill, the house he built to his own design at Twickenham, virtually ushered in Britain's Gothic Revival, as his novel The Castle of Otranto set going that revival in fiction...
...outside the window, ghosts roam the castle's corridors, haunted eyes gleam in the dark. In a pit beneath the trap door in the cellar lies a mysteriously deformed skeleton. "This Gothick tale," says Author Russell Kirk, is "in unblushing line of direct descent from The Castle of Otranto." He is wrong. Historian Kirk (The Conservative Mind) has expertly stuffed his book with all the claptrappings of the Gothic romance, but what he has actually achieved is a political morality tale. For all the apparent ectoplasm floating about it, the Old House of Fear is haunted not by ghosts...
...Castle of Otranto. All of this goes on in something that is not to be believed. The Kerr-Hilton, as Jean Kerr calls her home, is both the sum and summary of its contents, a brick and half-timber Tudor-Spanish architectural error on the edge of Long Island Sound. Like the Kerrs, it sits squarely in the suburbs, but its outlines are in fairyland. Built by a rich automotive inventor on the original foundations of the Larchmont Shore Club stables, it looks like the Castle of Otranto, reaching high with turrets and towers and a cupola. It also looks...
...that it all began in the womb of English letters some two centuries ago. Pioneering American novelists had two English models-the sentimental novel of love embodied in Richardson's Clarissa and the gothic novel of crumbling castles and mental phantoms invented by Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto). Eventually housewives and what Hawthorne called "female scribblers" took over the sentimental novel; as a romantic fantasy it has paced U.S. bestseller lists ever since. When Charles Brockden Brown, a graceless but serious 18th century writer, replaced Italian ruins with the American wilderness and aristocratic doom with Indian gore...