20th century Italian literature
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Important early 20th century Italianwriters include Italo Svevo, the author of La coscienza di Zeno (1923); Luigi Pirandello, who explored the shifting nature of reality in his prose fiction and such plays as Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1921) ; and the novelists Giovanni Verga (an exponent of verismo or Naturalism) and Cesare Pavese. Poetry was represented by the Crepuscolari and the Futurists; the foremost member of the latter group was Filippo Marinetti. Leading Modernist poets from later in the century include Salvatore Quasimodo, Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale (winner of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature), described by critics as "hermeticists". Dino Buzzati wrote fantastic and allegorical fiction which has been compared to Kafka and Beckett. Italo Calvino also ventured into fantasy in the trilogy I nostri antenati (Our Ancestors, 1952-1959) and post-modernism in the novel Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore... (If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, 1979). Primo Levi documented his experiences in Auschwitz in Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man) and other books. Giuseppe di Lampedusa wrote only one novel, Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1958), but it is one of the most famous in Italian literature; it deals with the life of a Sicilian nobleman in the 19th century. Other novelists include Alberto Moravia (e.g. Il conformista, 1951); Carlo Emilio Gadda, author of the experimental Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (1957); Natalia Ginzburg; and the Sicilian Leonardo Sciascia. Umberto Saba won fame for his collection of poems Il canzoniere. Pier Paolo Pasolini was a controversial poet and novelist. More recently, Umberto Eco became internationally successful with his novel Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose, 1980).
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