Il Piacere (Pleasure) is the first novel by Gabriele D'Annunzio, written in 1889 at Francavilla al Mare, and published the following year by Fratelli Treves.

Beginning in 1895, the novel was republished with the heading I Romanzi della Rosa ("The Romances of the Rose"), forming a narrative cycle including The Intruder (The Victim, in America), and Triumph of Death.

Andrea Sperelli is a young noble dandy of Rome who lives in Palazzo Zuccari (Trinità dei Monti), although he is originally from Abruzzo.

Andrea fights a duel with a rival for the affections of yet another married woman, but gets injured, and taken to Francavilla al Mare, where, at Villa Schifanoja, he meets the beautiful Maria Ferres.

On 31 December 1886 Andrea Sperelli anxiously awaits the arrival of his ex-lover, Elena Muti in his house, Palazzo Zuccari.

Once he returns to Rome, Andrea resumes his decadent lifestyle, as it was before his injury: he spends time with women of the demimonde and superficial, indifferent friends.

Rejected by Elena's cold nature, Andrea learns through friends that Maria's husband has fallen into financial ruin caused by gambling.

Andrea, however, is struggling to conceal his "doppio gioco," literally, double game, that he has been playing, wherein he has been courting Maria and Elena without either of them knowing about the other.

D'Annunzio was inspired by Huysmans's pioneering work À rebours, which also strongly influenced Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Sperelli's search for pleasure is doomed to remain unsatisfied, since he is unable to choose between two feminine archetypes represented, respectively, by Elena Muti (the femme fatale) and Maria Ferres (the pure woman), which cannot coexist in a single individual.

The style of the novel is also of utmost importance: D'Annunzio adopts a unique brand of writing replete with courtly neologisms, frequently inflected with assonance and consonance.