A magic decade of Italian writing followed the fall of Benito Mussolini's Fascist government and the liberation of Rome in 1944. Ignazio Silone, author of one of the great novels of the 1930s, Bread and Wine, returned from exile. Alberto Moravia, who helped define the modern conscience with his novel The Time of Indifference, left the mountains outside Rome, where he had been hiding from the Germans. Rome filled with veterans of the partisan war, of the underground, of the anonymity and silence of the Italian police state. The suffering of the war, the bold hopes which blossomed after Fascism's overthrow, were described in a torrent of films, stories and novels, bringing a kind of climax to one of the great national literatures of the twentieth century.
American William also arrived in Rome in the late 1940s. There he became friends with an astonishing array of Italy's leading men and women of letters, and in time would establish himself as the preeminent translator for the post-war era of Italian literature into English. Open City is an anthology of the writers Weaver admired most--Silone, Moravia, Elsa Morante, Carlo Levi, Giorgio Bassani, Natalia Ginzburg, and Carlo Emilio Gadda--and they all come to life in the pages of his long introductory memoir.
Edited with an Introduction by William Weaver
With the Editorial Assistance of Kristina Olson
Editorial Review(s)
"For the writers Weaver champions here, openness--to sexuality, to fresh political ideas, to la dolce vita--was everything. Not surprisingly, he has excerpted texts that subtly evince this newfound expansiveness." --Jay Parini, The New York Times Book Review
![Published in 1851, The House of the Seven Gables was conceived by Nathaniel Hawthorne as a modern-day sequel to The Scarlet Letter, which had appeared the year before. Set in Salem, the story's dramatic center revolved around two elederly characters, Hepzibah and Clifford Pyncheon, as they struggle to free themselves from a centuries-old family curse, ghostly forebears, and a crippling sense of hereditary guilt. They find themselves aided in their quest by their young cousin, Phoebe, and a mysterious daguerreotypist named Holgrave, who has taken up residence with them. Watching over this human drama, as if awaiting its outcome, is the brooding House of the Seven Gables, the Pyncheon ancestral home.
In this book Hawthorne hoped to dispel the gloom of the Puritan past that pervades The Scarlet Letter. Whether or not he succeeded has long been a matter of opinion. Hawthorne's wife, Sophia, praised her husband's new romance for its "dear home-loveliness and satisfaction," while Herman Melville found it a damnably dark and subversive work: "[Hawthorne] says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes."](https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-ezptpblrxu/images/stencil/500x659/products/428/805/HouseSevenGables__63675.1659472144.jpg?c=2 "Published in 1851, The House of the Seven Gables was conceived by Nathaniel Hawthorne as a modern-day sequel to The Scarlet Letter, which had appeared the year before. Set in Salem, the story's dramatic center revolved around two elederly characters, Hepzibah and Clifford Pyncheon, as they struggle to free themselves from a centuries-old family curse, ghostly forebears, and a crippling sense of hereditary guilt. They find themselves aided in their quest by their young cousin, Phoebe, and a mysterious daguerreotypist named Holgrave, who has taken up residence with them. Watching over this human drama, as if awaiting its outcome, is the brooding House of the Seven Gables, the Pyncheon ancestral home.
In this book Hawthorne hoped to dispel the gloom of the Puritan past that pervades The Scarlet Letter. Whether or not he succeeded has long been a matter of opinion. Hawthorne's wife, Sophia, praised her husband's new romance for its \"dear home-loveliness and satisfaction,\" while Herman Melville found it a damnably dark and subversive work: \"[Hawthorne] says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes.\"")