“He looked at his watch, trying to hurry up, to find the strength to get up. It was no use. Useless.” Giorgio Bassani returns to dig into the well of memories, in an ideal continuation of his past works, with the themes and places dearest to him: Ferrara and its surroundings, the racial laws, the character of the Italians, his high social position in a changing world with the potential danger of communists ready to...
“Misfortune had made a man out of him.” Moving like few other books, capable of touching the dormant childhood within each of us. With this long story, Bassani delves into his memories as a boy, up to take us to the beginning of the school year of 1929-30 in a classical high school, in his beloved Ferrara (the city of Bassani’s heart!). The shyness of the protagonist and a character that has not yet fully...
Written by Annalisa Piersanti This review is available only in the original language. ___________________________________________________________________ Gli occhiali d’oro è stato il primo libro di Giorgio Bassani che ho letto. Scovato casualmente in una bancarella triestina di libri usati, nella primissima edizione Einaudi, sono rimasta subito colpita dal titolo e dalla copertina. Gli occhiali d’oro sono un chiaro simbolo di qualcosa di unico, speciale, di identificativo, un leitmotiv di ispirazione wagneriana, come il blu e il...
“In life, if one wants to understand, to truly understand how things are in this world, he must die at least once.” During a car trip with a couple of friends and their child, in the countryside of central Italy, some reflections on the Etruscan civilization open the doors of the author’s memory, who finds himself in a moment to remember events that occurred during his youth in his Ferrara. A dip in the past...
