Babelguides: Italian Literature

Italian Literature

A Woman [Buy Direct]

by Sibilla Aleramo
Translated by Rosalind Delmar
Original title: Una donna

by Gabriele D’Annunzio
Translated by Georgina Harding
Original title: L’innocente

This is a confessional novel whose protagonist, Tullio Hermil, recounts the crime he has committed. Believing himself to be an exceptional man, a rare spirit, he allows himself, by virtue of this presumed uniqueness, to indulge in a series of marital infidelities. (more...)

The Heron [Buy Direct]

by Giorgio Bassani
Translated by William Weaver
Original title: L’airone

The protagonist of this psychological novel personifies the post-liberation (1945) generation in Italy and the frustration of the ideals experienced in those years. Bassani follows a day in the life of Edgardo Limentani — his last day. It’s a long, (more...)

Garden of the Finzi-Continis [Buy Direct]

by Giorgio Bassani
Translated by I Quigley
Original title: Il giardino dei Finzi-Continis

This story is set in the fascist era of the 20s and 30s. The garden lies behind a villa in the prosperous Northern city of Ferrara and is the centre of the happy world of Alberto and Micòl, children of a wealthy Jewish family. (more...)

Senso & Other Stories [Buy Direct]

by Camillo Boito
Translated by Christine Donougher
Original title: Senso ed altre storielle vane

Set against the scarcely discernible backdrop of Italy’s war of unification in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Senso can be seen as the last act in the drama of an aristocracy in decline, thoroughly contaminated by its connection to a decaying tradition. (more...)

Work of Betrayal [Buy Direct]

by Mario Brelich
Translated by R Rosenthal
Original title: Opera del tradimento

Plague-Sower [Buy Direct]

by Gesualdo Bufalino
Translated by Stephen Sartarelli
Original title: Diceria dell’untore

By transferring the exquisitely Nordic atmosphere of the sanitorium into a Sicily of baroque radiance and gleaming seas Bufalino perhaps meant to place his story of sickness and death within the tradition of the nineteenth century novel. In fact it’s 1946, the war is over, (more...)

Tartar Steppe [Buy Direct]

by Dino Buzzati
Translated by S Hood
Original title: Il deserto dei Tartari

This is the story of a young officer, Lieutenant Giovanni Drogo, who is sent on his first commission to Fort Bastiani, a desert outpost which is supposedly a vital strategic buffer against enemy attack. (more...)

The Ruin of Kasch [Buy Direct]

by Roberto Calasso
Translated by Sartarelli, S Weaver W
Original title: La rovina di Kasch

The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony [Buy Direct]

by Roberto Calasso
Translated by T Parks
Original title: Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia

Roberto Calasso is the editorial director of the respected Milan publishing house Adelphi Edizioni and a well-known intellectual and literary figure both in Italy and abroad. He has been nicknamed ‘l’anti-Eco’ — the ‘anti-Umberto Eco’ — by the Italian press. (more...)

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