Giorgio Bassani was an Italian novelist, poet, essayist, editor, and international intellectual.
Biography
Bassani was born in Bologna into a prosperous Jewish family of Ferrara, where he spent his childhood with his mother Dora, father Enrico, brother Paolo, and sister Jenny. In 1934 he completed his studies at his secondary school, the liceo classicoL. Ariosto in Ferrara. Music had been his first great passion and he considered a career as a pianist; however literature soon became the focus of his artistic interests. In 1935 he enrolled in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Bologna. Commuting to lectures by train from Ferrara, he studied under the art historianRoberto Longhi. His ideal of the "free intellectual" was the liberal historian and philosopher Benedetto Croce. Despite the anti-Semiticrace laws which were introduced from 1938, he was able to graduate in 1939, writing a thesis on the nineteenth-century writer, journalist, radical and lexicographer Niccolò Tommaseo. As a Jew in 1939, however, work opportunities were now limited and he became a schoolteacher in the JewishSchool of Ferrara in via Vignatagliata. In 1940 his first book, Una città di pianura, was published under the pseudonym "Giacomo Marchi" in order to evade the race laws. During this period, along with friends he had made in Ferrara's intellectual circle, he became a clandestine political activist. His activity in the anti-fascist resistance led to his arrest in May 1943; he was released on 26 July, the day afterBenito Mussolini was ousted from power. A little over a week later he married Valeria Sinigallia, whom he had met playing tennis. They moved to Florence for a brief period, living under assumed names, then at the end of the year, to Rome, where he would spend the rest of his life. His first volume of poems, Storie dei poveri amanti e altri versi, appeared in 1944; a second, Te lucis ante, followed in 1947. He edited the literary reviewBotteghe oscure for Princess Marguerite Caetani from its founding in 1948 until it ceased publication in 1960. In 1953 La passeggiata prima di cena appeared and in 1954 Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti. In the same year he became editor of Paragone, a journal founded by Longhi and his wife Anna Banti. Bassani's writings reached a wider audience in 1956 with the publication of the Premio Strega-winning book of short stories, Cinque storie ferraresi. As an editorial director of Feltrinelli Bassani was responsible for the posthumous publication in 1958 of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo, a novel which had been rejected by Elio Vittorini at Mondadori, and Einaudi. It became one of the great successes of post-war Italian literature. Bassani's enthusiastic editing of the text, following instructions from who had offered him the manuscript, later became controversial, however; recent editions have been published which follow the manuscript more closely. Also in 1958 Bassani's novel Gli occhiali d'oro was published, an examination, in part, of the marginalisation of Jews and homosexuals. Together with stories from Cinque storie ferraresi it was to form part of a series of works known collectively as Il romanzo di Ferrara, which explored the city, with its Christian and Jewish elements, its perspectives and its landscapes. The series includes: Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini ; Dietro la porta ; L'airone and L'odore del fieno. These works realistically document the Italian Jewish community under Fascism in a style that manifests the difficulties of searching for truth in the meanderings of memory and moral conscience. In 1960 one of his short stories was adapted as the filmLong Night in 1943. From 1965 to 1980, Giorgio Bassani was the president of the organization Italia Nostra. Bassani died in 2000 and was buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Ferrara. He was survived by his estranged wife Valeria and their two children Paola and Enrico. He had been with his companion Portia Prebys, since shortly after they met in 1977. Bassani received the, the Strega, the Campiello, the Viareggio and the Nelly Sachs prizes. He collaborated on several screen plays.
