Master of Masks and Identity ItalyStories.com — Great Italian Writers Luigi Pirandello was born in 1867 near Agrigento, Sicily, and became one of the most radical dramatists and storytellers of modern Europe. His world is full of mirrors, masks, unstable…
The Scholar of Signs and Mysteries ItalyStories.com — Great Italian Writers Umberto Eco was born in Alessandria, in Piedmont, in 1932, and grew into one of the rare intellectuals who could move with equal confidence between medieval theology, comic books,…
The Inventor of Invisible Worlds ItalyStories.com — Great Italian Writers Italo Calvino was born in 1923 in Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba, where his Italian parents were working as scientists. His father, Mario, was an agronomist and botanist; his mother,…
Witness of Memory and Conscience ItalyStories.com — Great Italian Writers Primo Levi was born in Turin in 1919 into a Jewish Italian family and grew up in a city shaped by industry, science, engineering, and a strong tradition of civic…
A Powerful Voice of Italian Literature ItalyStories.com — Great Italian Writers Elsa Morante was born in Rome in 1912 and became one of the most powerful, independent, and difficult-to-classify voices in twentieth-century Italian literature. Her novels are large in emotion…
The Prince of The Leopard ItalyStories.com – Great Italian Writers Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa belongs to that rare category of writers whose reputation rests largely on a single book, yet whose single book seems large enough to contain an entire…
Between Mystery and Reality ItalyStories.com – Great Italian Writers Dino Buzzati was one of the most distinctive Italian writers of the twentieth century, a storyteller able to make ordinary offices, mountain roads, military outposts, hospitals, and city apartments feel as…
The Poet of Fire and Style ItalyStories.com – Great Italian Writers Gabriele D'Annunzio was not merely a writer who lived in Italy; he attempted to turn his own life into a work of art, a spectacle, and at times a…
The Irony of Modern Life ItalyStories.com – Great Italian Writers Italo Svevo was born Ettore Schmitz in Trieste on December 19, 1861, and the name under which he became famous already tells the story of a divided identity. "Italo" suggested…
The Poet of Nests and Small Wonders ItalyStories.com Giovanni Pascoli was born in 1855 in San Mauro di Romagna, and few Italian poets transformed private grief into a poetic language as distinctive as his. At first glance, Pascoli's world can…