Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Buzzati's
Il deserto dei Tartari
(The Tartar Steppe; 1940)
,
an ambitious officer posted to
a mythical Italian border is besieged by boredom, thwarted expectations and disappearing
youth while waiting for enemy hordes to materialise - a parable drawn from Buzzati's
own dead-end newspaper job.
Over the centuries, Niccolo Machiavelli's
Il principe
(The Prince; 1532) has been refer-
enced as a handy manual for budding autocrats, but also as a cautionary tale against un-
checked 'Machiavellian' authority.
Crime Pays
Crime fiction and
gialli
(mysteries) dominate Italy's best-seller list, and one of its finest
writers is Gianrico Carofiglio. The former head of Bari's anti-Mafia squad, Carofiglio's
novels include the award-winning
Testimone inconsapevole
(Involuntary Witness; 2002),
which introduces the shady underworld of Bari's hinterland.
Art also imitates life for judge-cum-novelist Giancarlo de Cataldo, whose best-selling
novel
Romanzo criminale
(Criminal Romance; 2002) spawned both a TV series and film.
Another crime writer with page-to-screen success is Andrea Camilleri, his savvy Sicilian
inspector Montalbano starring in capers like
Il ladro di merendine
(The Snack Thief;
1996).
Umberto Eco gave the genre an intellectual edge with
Il nome della rosa
(The Name of
the Rose; 1980) and
Il pendolo di Foucault (
Foucault's Pendulum; 1988). In Eco's
Il cim-
itero di Praga
(The Prague Cemetery; 2010), historical events merge with the tale of a
master killer and forger.
Historical Epics
Set during the Black Death in Florence, Boccaccio's
Decameron
(c 1350-53) has a viscer-
al gallows humour that foreshadows Chaucer and Shakespeare. Italy's 19th-century
struggle for unification parallels the story of star-crossed lovers in Alessandro Manzoni's
I
promessi sposi
(The Betrothed; 1827, definitive version released 1842), and causes an
identity crisis among Sicilian nobility in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's
Il gattopardo
(The Leopard; published posthumously in 1958).
Wartime survival strategies are chronicled in Elsa Morante's
La storia
(History; 1974)
and in Primo Levi's autobiographical account of Auschwitz in
Se questo รจ un uomo
(If
This Is a Man; 1947). WWII is the uninvited guest in
Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini
(The
Garden of the Finzi-Continis; 1962), Giorgio Bassani's tale of a crush on a girl whose ar-
