The Child of Pleasure (written in 1888 and published in 1889) and its protagonist Andrea Sperelli introduced the Italian culture of the late 1800s to Aestheticism and a taste for decadence. Sperelli is a young count, who - like Joris Karl Huysmans" Baron Des Esseintes or Oscar Wilde"s Dorian Gray - following family tradition, seeks beauty and despises the bourgeois world; leads an extraordinary life, which he lives as a work of art; and rejects the basic rules of morality and social interaction. However, this extraordinary sensitivity also implies a certain corruption, evident in his sadistic superimposing of the two women: Elena Muti and Maria Ferres.