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CHAPTER 32
Italy’s Influence on Dominican Art
By Jeannette Miller
Poet, narrator, essayist and art historian. Winner of the National Prize of Literature (2011)
•
Reference Points for the Cultural Ties between Italy and the Dominican Republic
in the Nineteenth Century
ntil the mid-nineteenth century, the trickle of Italian migration to the Dominican Republic consisted
primarily of priests, merchants, and those with scant resources who came to seek a better life. How-
ever, forty years after the proclamation of Dominican independence (1844),
Francisco Gregorio
Billini
, a Dominican writer, politician, and educator, was elected president of the republic (1884-
1885). He is considered one of the most significant figures in Dominican history. Francisco Gregorio Billini
was the grandson of Juan Antonio Billini Ruse (1787-1852), a native of Piedmont, who arrived on the island of
Santo Domingo in 1802.
1
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the growth of the sugar industry served as a catalyst for the
arrival of Italians who settled mainly in Santo Domingo and La Romana; thereafter, the habits and culture of
the Italian peninsula began to blend with Dominican customs.
2
During that time, one of the best reference points regarding the cultural links between Italy and the Do-
minican Republic can be found in the articles written by the culture and art critic Rafael Díaz Niese in the
Diario Itinerante
published in the famous
Cuadernos Dominicanos de Cultura
in the 1940s.
3
From these annals, we find that Díaz Niese, one of the most highly educated Dominicans at that time, was
a fan of Italian culture and that he visited Italy and walked wherever he could in order to know its museums
and architecture, of course without neglecting music, theater, and literature, thus achieving a deep knowledge
of the classical canons, aware that they were the basis of Western culture.
Díaz Niese promoted the creation of the Dominican art academies, which were founded beginning in
1941, and he was also head of the General Directorate of Fine Arts, an official entity that included the National
Symphony Orchestra (1941), the National School of Fine Arts (1942), and the Theater School of National Art
(1946), etc.
In books, essays, and articles, important Dominican writers before him had described the magnificences
of Roman, Florentine, and Venetian monuments and museums, emphasizing, in particular, the visual arts.
Such writers include the novelist Tulio M. Cestero, author of
Sueño de una mañana florentina
(Dream of a
Florentine Morning)—which was part of a travel journal with personal testimonies titled
Hombres y piedras:
al margen del Baedeker
(Men and Stones: on the Sidelines of the Baedeker, 1915)—and Rafael Abréu Licairac,
author of
Recuerdos y notas de viaje
(Travel Memoirs and Notes, 1907).
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Italy’s presence in the Dominican Republic began