Giorgio Bassani
Giorgio Bassani, (b. March
4, 1916, Bologna, Italy—d. April 13, 2000, Rome), Italian
author and editor noted for his novels and stories examining
individual lives played out against the background of modern
history. The author’s Jewish heritage and the life of the
Jewish community in Ferrara, where he lived most of his
life, are among his recurrent themes.
In 1938 Bassani was
studying literature in Bologna when racial laws were passed
in Italy that restricted the activities of Jews, including
banning them from universities. Bassani, who had to publish
his early works under a pseudonym (Giacomo Marchi), became
involved in the antifascist movement in the early 1940s and
was briefly arrested in 1943. After World War II he settled
in Rome, where he continued his writing career. In addition
to writing novels, poetry, screenplays, and essays, he also
edited several literary journals, including Bottega Oscura.
The collection Cinque
storie ferraresi (1956; U.K. title, Prospect of Ferrara,
U.S. title, Five Stories of Ferrara; reissued as Dentro le
mura, 1973; “Inside the Wall”), five novellas that describe
the growth of fascism and anti-Semitism, brought Bassani his
first commercial success and the Strega Prize (offered
annually for the best Italian literary work). The Ferrara
setting recurs in Bassani’s best-known book, the
semiautobiographical Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1962;
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis; film, 1971). The narrator
of this work contrasts his own middle-class Jewish family
with the aristocratic, decadent Finzi-Continis, also Jewish,
whose sheltered lives end in annihilation by the Nazis.
Bassani’s later novels
include L’airone (1968; The Heron), a portrait of a lonely
Ferrarese landowner during a hunt. This novel received the
Campiello Prize for best Italian prose work. Bassani also
wrote L’odore del fieno (1972; The Smell of Hay). His
collections of poetry include Rolls Royce and Other Poems
(1982), which contains selections in English and Italian
from earlier collections. Bassani’s elegiac tone has
frequently elicited comparison with those of Henry James and
Marcel Proust, his acknowledged models.
