The house as theater of memory: Mario Praz and his House of Life

In classical and Renaissance culture, the tool of memory, used in the art of rhetoric, was linked to architecture: buildings such houses and, in sixteenth-century, theaters, were used as containers of images that could help to remember the correct sequence and development of the speech, and as devices to collect the universal knowledge and to represent the world. With these premises, we could interpret the house as the place we collect, represent, and stage our theater of memories through the spatial arrangement and the furnishing of the interiors. The case study of Mario Praz’s house in Rome and the book that he wrote about it are the tangible manifestation of this way of thinking, designing, and interpreting the domestic interior.