10 of the best novels set in Italy – that will take you there
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Loading... - Viola Bertoni
- 07 Jun 2022
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Long before Covid-19, there were always bad things in the press about Italy: corruption, mafia, bureaucracy. But, whenever I went, life seemed to work out even so. People may be poor but they still sit in the sun, drink and chat; music and culture are a birthright; the right seems in the ascendant but on the ground it feels blessed with far-seeing idealists – it has almost four times as much land under organic cultivation as the UK, for example. For now, my remedy to the withdrawal symptoms I feel is to visit via the written word. Many writers have set books in Italy – I was sorry to leave out Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow (Calabria), and Ali Smith’s How to be Both (Ferrara) – but here are my top 10 romanze italiane.
The Other End of the Line by Andrea Camilleri
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
It’s been done on stage and TV but Elena Ferrante’s tale (the first in her Neapolitan tetralogy) of poverty, amici and mafiosi in 20th-century Naples is still best savoured in book form (though I appear to be alone in finding Anne Goldstein’s translation clunky). Readers might picture Lenù and Lila growing up amid narrow streets picturesquely hung with laundry, but in fact the book’s unnamed “neighbourhood” is not the historic centre but Rione Luzzatti, a blocky Fascist-era suburb beyond the main railway station. From here, readers follow the heroines as they mount expeditions through the tunnel and along the stradone to the central Mercato district, wealthy Vomero and, fatefully, the beaches of beautiful Ischia. Read More...
