In the introduction to this touching collection of several influential writers, William Weaver illustrates with photographic precision the personalities and circumstances that defined the Rome of the postwar epoch. For anyone interested in contemporary Italian writing, Mr. Weaver's profound insight and vast personal knowledge of both Rome and its writers will be an enlightening experience. No other book offers the reader such a fascinating invitation into the lives and stories that were the lost, open city of postwar Rome.

Behind the Door by the same author is a much better book. I'd be curious as to whether Garden was considered a classic before the movie, or if this is just another example of literature being considered subservient to film.

That being said, Garden is a nice book that reads like a memoir of a young Jewish man in Italy of the 1930s.

Some readers will be familiar with this story because this novel was the basis for the beautiful and haunting film of the same title. Comparisons between the film and the book are inevitable. The basic story is identical in both. The narrator is a young, middle class Italian Jew in the provincial city of Ferrara. The events take place on the eve of WWII and are set against the background of the anti-semitic legislation and policies of the Italian fascist state. The book recounts the hopeless infatuation of the narrator with the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family. This doomed and largely one-sided passion is presented subtly as an allegory of the fate of the Italian Jewish community. Not surprisingly, the book is considerably more detailed than the movie, more detached, and at times almost ironic in tone. The quality of writing is excellent, even in translation, and the characterization of pre-war Ferrara is evocative. The gradual constriction of the life of Italian Jews emerges slowly and indirectly, but with great power. The book also features an important subplot concerning the narrator's relationship with his father which is also presented with delicacy and real pathos. This is one of those books whose impact tends to linger well after you finish reading it.

A few months ago, I was visiting a friend in Ferrara and while walking through the streets of the town I was reminded of the Finzi Continis' sad story.
Going by the wall surrounding the house where they used to live, I went back to the times of their youth(the 30s and 40s)and I could nearly hear their happy voices, Alberto, Micol and their friends playing tennis in the big garden, Alberto on his wheeling chair watching the others play.
Ghosts of a time past, happy young people unware of what was waiting for them just round one of the corners of their lives.
I read the the book a few years ago and I was impressed by the sad, but never tragic style of the author Giorgio Bassani.
The story is a recollection of the life of a Jewish family from Ferrara before and during the Nazi-fascist persecutions of world war two.
The story of the one-sided love of the author for Micol Finzi Contini the Jewish girl who seems to foresee her destiny and refuses to return his love. She seems to know about her deportation to a concentration camp somewhere in Germany where would be lost any trace of her and her family.
She is doomed and she knows it.
Mr. Bassani tells his children this story while visiting an Etruscan necropolis, it is his story too and sadly points out that there are no tombs where to grieve and pray for Micol and her family, there is only their memory left in the hearts of those who loved them

This short but powerful novel by Giorgio Bassani is less well known than his most famous work, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. However, it deals with similar themes of alienation and the awakening into adulthood. At one level, this is a story of an adolescent Jewish boy surviving in the Catholic world of Ferrara in the 1930s. Although academically successful at school, he is set, and indeed places himself, apart from his peers. At another level, it is a story of sexual awakenings and sexual uncertainty. Perhaps above all it is about friendship, the betrayal of trust and entry into the adult world. Beautifully drawn by Bassani, and crisply translated by Weaver, like Moravia's 'Two Adolescents', this is a world too rarely visited with empathy and sensitivity. Well worth reading. It will bring back memories. It will make you think.

Giorgio Bassano died yesterday (15 April, 2000) at 84 in his beloved Bolonia. So I rush to write this review on one of his most famous texts, BEHIND THE DOOR. I think that, together with GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS, it is his most finished work.

A Jewish himself he fought against Fascism and attacked Mussolini from his Magazine BOTTEGHE OSCURE. He was also a member of the Resistence until his imprisonment in 1943.

This ambigous feeling of being both an Italian and an outcast in Fascist Italy, will permeate his writings. This is particularly evident in GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS. His ontological isolation will be a constant as a way of reacting to an Italian tradition that was inclined to live and let live with the Jews. Let's remember that Mussolini broke away with this tradition causing persecution of Jews and discontent among the Left-Wing. We'll see that this ontological isolation informs BEHIND THE DOOR as well.

It deals with the eternal theme of the access to the real world and the breaking-off with the adolescent world. The protagonist, a sensitive and intelligent young student, lives in a microcosmos of his own where strong and weak use each other and exploit themselves just as adults do. The discovery of sexuality, and therefore, of individuality and of the "other", causes an existential crisis from which the boy will come out as a man, only to discover that nothing has changed and thal evil is but one of the faces of Love.

This is very serious literature, deep and complex, and I think that Bassani's time has not yet arrived.