This is a 1956 novel by the Italian writer Giorgio Bassani. It’s part of a six novel series called “The Novel of Ferrara” and contains the much more famous novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, which became a well-known film. I will review that novel later on.
This novel splits its time among several different tangentially connected stories. The effect is of walking through the small city, being told about various landmarks–some official and some unofficial–and then given the stories behind them. In some cases, these landmarks are the literal plaques and markers relating history around town, and in other cases they are the landmarks of history, which is contained in the memories of the surviving city dwellers. It’s not a small city (about 130,000 now) and so there were plenty of survivors.
The city, like a lot of Italian cities was one seat of fascist power from 1923-1943, from the rise of Mussolini until the fall of Italy to the allied forces and the put down of the regime. The stories float around this wide array of time–there’s a love affair between two ill-suited people, there’s the story of a supporter of fascism, there’s various account of an event in 1943 where 180 Jews were killed in the town, in part because they had been outed and called up, but also in part as a show of “good faith” to the Nazis.
The spends much of its short length focusing on the markers of memory, and then the erasure of the history not necessarily by the conscious decisions of bad actors, but of the sweeps of time and the desire to live. I don’t know where the series goes from here, but I am already thinking a lot on the question of “What do you do after?” and “Can you begin again?”
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Within-Walls-Penguin-Modern-Classics/dp/014119216X)