- Bassani, Giorgio
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▪ 2001Italian writer and editor (b. March 4, 1916, Bologna, Italy—d. April 13, 2000, Rome, Italy), skillfully presented the plight of Jews of the Ferrara community in Fascist-era Italy in his award-winning 1962 novel Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, 1965). Wildly popular, the book was translated into several languages and made into a movie that won the 1971 Academy Award for best foreign film. Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini was not, however, Bassani's only claim to fame. He won Italy's Strega Prize in 1956 for his short-story collection Cinque storie ferraresi (Five Stories of Ferrara, 1971). While working as an editor at the Feltrinelli publishing company, he secured the manuscript for Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's celebrated Il gattopardo (1958; The Leopard, 1960), a novel that other publishers had rejected because they thought the story was too old-fashioned. Besides his notable contributions to literature, Bassani also led an active public life. In 1955 he worked together with other Italian intellectuals to found Italia Nostra, an environmental protection and historic preservation society. From 1957 to 1967 he acted as vice president of RAI, the Italian national broadcasting network.
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▪ Italian authorborn March 4, 1916, Bologna, Italydied April 13, 2000, RomeItalian 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.* * *
Universalium. 2010.
