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The Italian town of Palestrina lies between Buchel and Pfeffering in the symbolic structure of Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus.¹ With the Manardi family Adrian Leverkühn finds his first surrogate home, before returning to Germany to find a mirror image of his native Buchel in Pfeffering outside Munich. Hans Mayer and others have noted the extent to which Palestrina is imbued with associations for Mann (Mayer 297-298). Here Thomas and his brother Heinrich worked on their earliest masterpieces, Buddenbrooks and Die kleine Stadt, cementing the association of this town with artistic endeavour and the young men's decision to become writers.² The town itself represented a continuity of European culture from its ancient foundations, predating Roman Praeneste as a site of the goddess Fortuna Hygeia, becoming the medieval Penestrino, home town and fortress of the Colonna family, whose fate was bound up with the history of the Papacy and the Empire, referred to by Dante in Canto twenty-seven of the Inferno, and then the late nineteenth-century Italian "kleine Stadt", the setting of Heinrich Mann's novel about the stresses of modernity in a traditional, popular democracy. The great papal composer Pierluigi Palestrina, saviour of medieval polyphony, adopted the name of his birthplace, and the late romantic German composer, Hans Pfitzner, who would exert a powerful influence on Thomas Mann at the time of the First World War, based his most successful work, the opera Palestrina, on the figure of the composer. In Mann's Doktor Faustus Palestrina supports important narrative functions: Adrian finds his first home away from home with the Manardi family, works on his first mature work, the opera buffa Love's Labour's Lost, and is visited by the Devil in Palestrina.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-8350-9676-9_15

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