The Moon and the Bonfires is the famed Italian author Cesare Pavese’s (1908–50) last novel. Published in June 1950 by the Italian publishing house Einaudi (where Pavese held a prominent position), the novel met immediate critical and commercial success. “To… Read More ›
Italian Literature
Analysis of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard
A historical novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896–1957), The Leopard was one of the most successful literary works of 20th-century European literature. The plot is straightforward: In 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi and his forces have landed in Marsala (Sicily) to… Read More ›
Analysis of Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before
The third novel by Italian author Umberto Eco (1932–2016), The Island of the Day Before is another extended meditation on the subjective nature of reality that demonstrates the deceptive nature of all signs and metaphors. Eco presents his historical romance… Read More ›
Analysis of Alberto Moravia’s The Indifferent Ones
The Italian author Alberto Moravia (1907–90) began writing his masterpiece The Indifferent Ones in 1925, when he was 17 years old. Publication came in 1929, when he was 21. The Indifferent Ones is the story of a Roman bourgeois family… Read More ›
Analysis of Primo Levi’s If Not Now, When?
This novel by the famed Italian author Primo Levi (1919–87) can be read on multiple levels. First, it is an exciting story, with the heroes (and heroines), a roving resistance band of Jews, trying whenever possible to wreak havoc in… Read More ›
Analysis of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum
Foucault’s Pendulum is the second novel by the highly prolific Italian writer Umberto Eco (1932–2016), and continues the pattern of linguistic games and narrative proliferation established in The Name of the Rose. This time the focus is more contemporary, with… Read More ›
Analysis of Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli
The Italian author and painter Carlo Levi (1902–75) wrote Christ Stopped at Eboli while hiding in a room looking onto Florence’s Palazzo Pitti during the final years of World War II. An Italian Jew, a painter with a degree in… Read More ›
Analysis of Umberto Eco’s Baudolino
The fourth novel by the prolific Italian novelist Umberto Eco (1932–2016) charts the adventurous life of the eponymous hero, a medieval adventurer and consummate liar with a gift for making the most of chance. The book opens with Baudolino rescuing… Read More ›
Analysis of Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees
Published first in Italian in 1957 and translated into English in 1959, The Baron in the Trees is an enchanting novel by Italo Calvino (1923–85). Because of the book’s mixture of fantasy and allegory, The Baron in the Trees is… Read More ›
Analysis of Dante’s Inferno
Dante’s Hell is a diorama of sin, enacted as both moral exhortation and poetic prophecy. Change is no longer possible here, and damnation is the irrevocable, total removal from God—a separation that is more terrible for being freely willed by… Read More ›
Analysis of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author
“Why not,” I said to myself, “present this highly strange fact of an author who refuses to let some of his characters live though they have been born in his fantasy, and the fact that these characters, having by now… Read More ›
A Brief History of Italian Novels
Giovanni Papini (1881-1956) argued that Italians are less suited temperamentally to writing novels than to writing poetry, essays, and biographies. Certainly, the art of storytelling has long been esteemed in Italy; Baldassare Castiglione, in Il cortegiano (1528; The Book of… Read More ›
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