The Italian Language

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Post-war literature

Italian cultural life enjoyed a flowering after the fall of Fascism. Liberty prompted writers to see and ponder on the world around them. Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) and Elio Vittorini (1908-1966) discovered contemporary American literature and developed their style accordingly. In post-war Italian neo-Realist literature there is an important regional current. Francesco Jovine (1902-1950) described social differences, poverty, ignorance and the abuse committed by the higher classes in the South in Le Terre di Sacramento. Beppe Fenoglio (1922-1963) portrayed the hard life of the Piedmontese peasantry in La Malora and in Partisan Johnny. Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989) analysed the Sicilian Mafia in the Giorno della Civetta and A Ciascuno il Suo. Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975), poet, novelist and film director, studied the young Roman proletariat from a psychological and sociological point of view in Ragazzi di Vita and Una Vita Violenta. Among Pasolini's poetry, his first important collection is La Meglio Gioventù.

		Both memoirs and autobiographies of the post-war period were inspired by the war and the Partisan resistance. Primo Levi's (1919-1987) If This Be a Man describes in detail the horrors of life in a concentration camp while Carlo Levi's (19-19) Cristo si è Fermato a Eboli depicts the life of a political prisoner in the archaic Italian south, in a town that, in the author's words, seemed even to ignore the passage of Jesus through Earth. The ordeals of the Russian front are portrayed in Mario Rigoni Stern's (1921) Sergeant in the Snow. At the beginning of the 1950s Neo-Realism went into decline, being replaced by a literature more preoccupied with personal and existential subjects. Giorgio Bassani’s (1916-2000) Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini discusses psychological problems during the Fascist and war periods. Carlo Cassola's (1917-1987) interest lay the study of everyday life which he describes in two novels, Il taglio del bosco and La ragazza di Bube. Vasco Pratolini's (1913-1991) works, Metello and Cronache di Poveri Amanti, mix psychology with realist observation. Italo Calvino’s (1923-1985) first novel The Path to the Nest of Spiders is set during the war, the main character being a child who joins a group of Partisans. Among Calvino’s collections of short stories we can mention Under the Jaguar Sun.
Primo Levi

Fresh horizons appeared in Italian poetry after the war; there being a new ideological, political and moral commitment on the part of poets. Their realism used a simple, direct language. Major poets were the later Quasimodo, Mario Luzi (1914-2005), Vittorio Sereni (1913-2005) and Alfonso Gatto (1909-1976).

Other successful writers of the XX century are Italo Calvino (1923- 1985), whose philosophical tales, such as I nostri antenati, have an original and fantastical twist; Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973) who uses a non-traditional language to portray contemporary society; Dino Buzzati (1906-1972), author of fantastic books, such as Il deserto dei tartari and Elsa Morante (1912-1990), author of La Storia and the controversial journalist Oriana Fallaci (1929-2006).

Among living authors we can mention Umberto Eco (1932), whose historical novels The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum and The Island of the Day Before have enjoyed great international success.