3. The festival for l’Unità: The l’Unità Festival was launched by the Italian Communist Party in 1945 to foster Communist identity and raise funds for l’Unità, Italy’s official Communist newspaper, founded by Antonio Gramsci in 1924. Italo Calvino, Cesare Pavese, Antonio Tabucchi and Elio Vittorini were among the writers in this anthology who wrote for l’Unità. Since the dissolution of the Italian Communist Party in 1991, the festival has continued under successor left-wing parties and coalitions. As of 2017, l’Unità has ceased publication, but l’Unità festivals are still held in numerous cities in Italy.
4. Emmanuelle: Emanuelle was an erotic French film released in 1974, based on the novel of the same name by Emmanuelle Arsan. Its protagonist was a French diplomat’s wife travelling to Thailand to meet her husband.
Goffredo Parise – Biographical note
1. From the Avvertenza (author’s note) of the 1984 complete edition of the Sillabari. The original Italian reads: ‘Ma all lettera S, nonostante i programmi, la poesia mi ha abbandonato.’
Anna Maria Ortese – Biographical note
1. From Ortese’s introduction to the 1994 edition of Il mare non bagna Napoli.
A MARTIAN IN ROME
1. The language used in this short story by Flaiano presents a variety of challenges, including a couple of expressions that cannot be precisely translated into English. The author’s use of Italian is specific to the 1950s, and, in some cases, unique to the city of Rome and its inhabitants. The text is riddled with formal, journalistic language, which is in direct contrast with the fantastic, ironic and at times ridiculous nature of the plotline. One of the expressions that cannot be properly rendered in English is a play on words, not entirely dissimilar to the phrase ‘Rome or bust’. When he describes a satirical drawing by Mino Maccari, Flaiano references the exclamation ‘O Roma o Marte!’ [‘Rome or Mars!’], an allusion to Garibaldi’s historical battle cry ‘O Roma o Morte!’ [‘Rome or Death!’].
Another aspect of the Italian language that is difficult to translate is the degree of formality implied in conversation by addressing an interlocutor in the third person, without having to resort to words like ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’. Since it is customary to address strangers formally in Italy, the choice not to do so is inherently informal, familiar and possibly disrespectful. The decision to address someone in dialect or standard Italian also carries similar weight. Standard language would normally be used in school, in the professional world, and when dealing with figures of authority. It can denote a certain distance, but also respect and consideration for the listener, since he or she may not even completely understand the dialect in question. Hence, when photographers shout at the Martian to get him to move out of the way, they are being rude for more than one reason. The forceful request ‘A Marzià, te scansi?’ is only truly clear to those who have at least a small understanding of the dialect known as Romanesco. To render the tone of derision and disdain in the original text, it was necessary to add an element of vulgarity, producing the following question: ‘Hey, Mr Mars, will you move your ass?’
(Names of people and places have not been translated. The spelling of the Martian’s name [Koont] has been graphically changed from the original form [Kunt] in order to avoid the vulgar connotation that this word implies in English, as it is non-existent in Italian.)
Massimo Bontempelli – Biographical note
1. Curzio Malaparte: Malaparte (1898–1957), born Kurt Erich Suckert to a Saxon father and Milanese mother, was one of Italy’s most controversial and contradictory literary figures. Fascist and anarchist in turn, he marched on Rome with Mussolini but later collaborated with Moravia to oppose Mussolini’s Racial Laws. And yet he was never forgiven by leftist artists and intellectuals for his Fascist links. Permission could not be obtained from the estate of Curzio Malaparte to include a selection by him in this volume
THE MIRACULOUS BEACH
1. Aminta: The title of a play written by Torquato Tasso in 1573 in which Aminta, a shepherd, falls in love with the nymph Silvia, who initially spurns him, but eventually the two are united.
THE STREETWALKER
1. Giansiro Ferrata: A critic and writer (1907–86).
2. Adua and Her Friends: A film made in 1960, starring Marcello Mastroianni and Simone Signoret, in which four prostitutes try to open a restaurant after the brothels are closed after the Merlin Law.
3. she liked the song, but not sung by Sergio Bruni – handsome profile, that Bruni, he hadn’t booed Villa, in Naples, he had paid his thugs to boo Villa, but now he had to pay some nice millions, to Villa, who had sued him: Sergio Bruni and Claudio Villa were popular Neapolitan singers. Bruni dramatically (and famously) withdrew at the last minute from the Festival of Neapolitan Song in 1960, refusing to participate in the final evening because of an argument with Villa and the festival organizers about who was to sing last.
Chronology
Literary Events Historical Events
1840: The historical novel, I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) by Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873), originally published in 1827, is definitively revised by the author and republished to make his prose consistent with contemporary educated Tuscan, thus setting the standard for modern written Italian.
Giovanni Verga, the oldest author in this volume, is born in Catania, Sicily.
1861: The kingdom of Italy is founded with Vittorio Emanuele II as its king. At the time, the Italian language is spoken by fewer than 10 percent of the population.
1871: Rome, annexed to the kingdom of Italy the year before, is named its capital.
1883: Benito Mussolini, son of a Socialist blacksmith and a schoolteacher, is born in Predappio, Italy.
1891: Luigi Pirandello submits his doctoral dissertation on Sicilian dialect, written in German, at the University of Bonn.
1901: Guglielmo Marconi transmits the first wireless signals across the Atlantic Ocean.
1905: James Joyce moves to Trieste, teaches English at the Berlitz School and befriends Italo Svevo, one of his students.
1907: Arnoldo Mondadori, a restaurant owner’s son who has only five years’ schooling, begins work that will lead to the founding of Mondadori, now Italy’s largest publishing house.
1909: ‘The Manifesto of Futurism’ by Egyptian-born poet and theorist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) is published, in French, in the pages of Le Figaro. 1912: Italy annexes parts of modern-day Libya.
1915: Italy enters the First World War, siding with Great Britain, France and Russia.
1916: Corrado Alvaro, a foot soldier in the First World War, is severely injured close to the Slovenian border.
1917: Alberto Savinio is sent to Thessaloniki, Greece, as an interpreter for the Italian army on the Macedonian front.
Tens of thousands of Italian soldiers are killed or wounded at the Battle of Caporetto.
1918: General Armistice. An estimated 600,000 Italians have died in combat. The country is mired in debt.
1921: The Communist Party of Italy, which will become the largest Communist party in Western Europe, is founded in Livorno.
1922: On October 28, Mussolini’s Fascist supporters march on Rome. Two days later he is charged with forming a government.
1924: First radio transmission in Italy. Early broadcasts provide a mix of opera, weather and stock-market news.
1926: Massimo Bontempelli and Curzio Malaparte (1898–1957) found the journal 900, a forum for Surrealist, Dadaist and other experimental writing. The Premio Bagutta, awarded to eight authors in this collection, is inaugurated. The prize will be suspended between 1937 and 1946 to resist pressure from Fascist authorities on the jury.
1927: Antonio Delfini starts a literary journal called L’ariete with Ugo Guandalini (1905–71), who will go on to found the publishing house Guanda. Fascist censors shut down the publication after one issue.
Grazia Deledda receives the Nobel Prize in Literature for the previous year.
1929: Umberto Saba begins psychoanalysis in Trieste with Edoardo Weiss (
1889–1970), a student of Sigmund Freud. The Viareggio Prize, awarded to sixteen authors in this collection, is inaugurated. Bompiani, the publisher of the anthology Americana, is founded in Milan.
1933: The publishing house Einaudi, with close ties to the Communist Party of Italy, is founded in Turin. Leone Ginzburg and Cesare Pavese are among its first editors.
1934: Luigi Pirandello wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Giuseppe Tomasi becomes the Prince of Lampedusa following his father’s death.
1935: Alba De Céspedes publishes her first collection of short stories, L’Anima degli altri (The Soul of Others), at twenty-four. 1935: Italy invades Ethiopia and will occupy the country over the next six years.
1936: Fabrizia Ramondino, the youngest author in this volume, is born. 1936: Italy and Germany enter into an alliance later known as the Axis.
1937: Philosopher and critic Antonio Gramsci (b. 1891), one of the founders of the Communist Party of Italy and imprisoned by Fascists since 1926, dies after being recently liberated, in a clinic in Rome.
1938: Mussolini’s Racial Laws take effect; Jews are excluded from public office and public education. Their works are banned.
1939: Dino Buzzati leaves for Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to report for Corriere della Sera.
1941: While convalescing from illness, Romano Bilenchi meets Ezra Pound in Rapallo.
1942: Silvio D’Arzo’s novel All’insegna del buon corsiero (At the Good Steed Inn) is published, the only one of his works to appear in his lifetime.
1943: Germany occupies Italy; Mussolini is made the head of a puppet regime known as the Republic of Salò.
In Cairo, Fausta Cialente founds Fronte Unito, a newspaper distributed to Italian civilians and Italian prisoners of war in Egypt, Libya and Eritrea.
1944: In February, Leone Ginzburg, husband of Natalia Ginzburg, is tortured to death by Nazis in a Roman prison.
1944: Rome is liberated by Allied troops on 4 June.
1945: Lalla Romano translates the diaries of Eugene Delacroix. 1945: Mussolini is captured and killed by the Partisans.
1946: Carlo Emilio Gadda writes a letter from Florence to the literary critic Gianfranco Contini (1912–90) about Tommaso Landolfi’s gambling winnings, mentioning that Landolfi spends the money on cashmere sweaters, opulent hats and a powerful motorcycle. 1946: Italian women vote for the first time. Italy becomes a republic.
1947: The first edition of the Strega Prize, Italy’s most prestigious honour for fiction, is awarded to Ennio Flaiano. Though founded by a woman – writer Maria Bellonci – a woman has only won eleven times in seventy-one years. 1947: Enactment of the Constitution of the Italian Republic. The text, composed in strikingly simple language, with five women among the seventy-five commissioned authors, was defined by the linguist Tullio De Mauro (1932–2017) as ‘parole di tutti e per tutti’ (‘everybody’s words, for everyone’).
1948: The literary magazine Botteghe Oscure is founded in Rome by American-born Princess Marguerite Caetani (1880–1963). Each issue publishes work in American English, British English, French, Italian and, in alternation, Spanish and German.
1949: Beppe Fenoglio has his first short story published under the pseudonym Giovanni Federico Biamonti.
1950: Anna Banti and her husband, the art historian Roberto Longhi (1890–1970), found the bi-monthly journal Paragone, dedicated to art and literature.
1951: Elio Vittorini is commissioned to edit the Gettoni series for Einaudi, an imprint of paperbacks designed to promote young Italian authors.
1953: The literary journal Nuovi Argomenti is founded in Rome. Alberto Moravia is its first editor-in-chief. 1954: Italian state TV commences broadcasts.
1956: Work begins on the ‘Autostrada del Sole’, a highway connecting Milan and Naples, and a symbol of the country’s burgeoning economy.
1957: Luciano Bianciardi is fired from his position as editor at Feltrinelli, a publishing house founded by the son of one of the richest men in Italy. 1957: Italy produces the Fiat 500, an economical car for city drivers.
1960: Educator Alberto Manzi (1924–1997) starts hosting Non è mai troppo tardi (It’s Never Too Late), an enormously popular television programme that teaches adult illiterates to read and write in Italian.
1962: The publishing house Adelphi is founded in Milan and is the first in the world to publish the complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche.
1965: The manufacturer Olivetti, founded in 1908 and famous for its typewriters, launches the first ‘desktop computer’, nicknamed ‘la Perottina’, at the World’s Fair in New York City.
1966: Goffredo Parise, reporting for Corriere della Sera, visits China, Laos and Vietnam. In the following years, he will write reportage on several other South-east Asians countries. 1966: The Arno river floods in Florence, devastating the historic centre, destroying thousands of valuable works of art, millions of rare books and documents, and killing thirty-five people in urban and outlying areas. Immediately afterward, students from Italy and abroad arrive by the hundreds in a massive volunteer effort to salvage the city’s cultural treasures.
1967: Publication of Il Doge (The Doge), Aldo Palazzeschi’s radically experimental novel, almost entirely lacking in dialogue.
1968: Italo Calvino receives the Viareggio Prize for the short-story collection Ti con zero (T Zero, also published as Time and the Hunter). He refuses it, sending a telegram in which he declares that the age of literary prizes is over. 1968: Nearly four thousand students in Rome, including militant leftists and neo-Fascists, engage in a violent face-off with police. The incident, known as ‘The Battle of Valle Giulia’, inspires a provocative poem by Pier Paolo Pasolini in which the Communist writer defends the police.
1969: The poet Vittorio Sereni (1913–83) creates the Meridiani series for Mondadori, critical anthologies designed to honour classic Italian and international authors.
1971: Einaudi publishes John Donne’s poems, edited and translated by Cristina Campo.
1972: Close to eight thousand people attend the funeral of publisher and leftist activist Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who dies setting out to destroy a power pylon. On his body were sticks of dynamite and a picture of his ten-year-old son.
1974: Leonardo Sciascia’s Todo Modo (One way or Another) is published, a novel critical of the Christian Democratic Party, the dominant political force at the time.
1975: Giovanni Arpino, in collaboration with Mario Maffiodo (1899–1976), launches Racconto, a journal dedicated to short fiction. The poet Eugenio Montale (1896–1981) wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. 1975: Pier Paolo Pasolini (b. 1922) is murdered in Ostia. The exact circumstances of his death remain a mystery.
1977: Carlo Cassola founds the League for the Unilateral Disarmament of Italy and campaigns for non-violence.
1978: The body of former prime minister Aldo Moro (1916–78) is found in the trunk of a car in Rome after being kidnapped and murdered by members of the Brigate Rosse, an extreme left-wing group dedicated to armed revolution.
1980: Publication of Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose), Italy’s first international bestseller, by Umberto Eco (1932–2016), a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna. 1980: The Bologna train station is bombed by right-wing terrorists, killing eighty-five people and injuring over two hundred.
1982: Elsa Morante’s last novel, Aracoeli, about an Andalusian mother’s relationship with her homosexual son, is published.
1983: The stories of Edgar Allen Poe, in three volumes, are published by Einaudi, translated by Giorgio Manganelli. 1983: Bettino Craxi becomes Italy’s first Socialist prime minister.
1986: Luce d’Eramo, known for writing about Nazi Germany and the consequences of the Second World War, publishes an anomalous science-fiction novel called Partiranno (They Will Leave), about friendly aliens that land in Rome. 1986: In Palermo, the Maxiprocesso (Maxi Trial) begins, a criminal trial prosecuting 474 members of the Sicilian mafia.
1987: Primo Levi commits suicide in Turi
n.
1988: The Salone del libro, Italy’s most important book fair, is first held in Turin.
1991: The Communist Party of Italy dissolves.
1992: Amore Molesto (Troubling Love), the first novel by the pseudonymous author Elena Ferrante, is published. 1992: A series of judicial investigations into political corruption, known as Mani Pulite (Clean Hands), brings down the political career of Bettino Craxi, along with most of Italy’s political establishment. Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, prosecuting magistrates who presided over the Maxi Trial, are killed by the Mafia, their murders only months apart.
1993: After years of financial hardship and neglect from the literary establishment, Anna Maria Ortese, seventy-nine, publishes the novel Il cardillo addolorato (The Lament of the Linnet) to critical acclaim.
1994: The Scuola Holden, Italy’s first school for Creative Writing and named after the protagonist of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, is founded in Turin. 1994: Media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi becomes prime minister for the first time.
1997: Dario Fo (1926–2016), an actor, director, comedian, playwright, songwriter, illustrator and political activist, wins the Nobel Prize in Literature.
2002: The Euro replaces the Lira.
2009: President of the Senate, Renato Schifani accuses Antonio Tabucchi of defamation for an article published in the Communist newspaper l’Unità, suing him for over one million euros.
Further Reading
The following list contains a few short-story collections, in English, by Italian authors active during the twentieth century whose work is not included in this volume, as well as a selection of English-language anthologies.
Individual Authors
The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories Page 50