Italian Literature

There is a rare lightness in this short novel by Carlo Lucarelli, a joy of narration, a sort of cheerful mischief. We enter with a surprising naturalness into an unknown yet immediately familiar world, the Eritrean Colony: and we learn to see ourselves, the t'Iiàn, the Italians, the "know-it-alls", cullu ba'llè, those who like "to have thought of things themselves," through the eyes of a character we would never want to leave: the indigenous policeman Ogbà, united by a pact more of brotherhood than discipline with Captain Colaprico (translated)...

Early one morning Guido Brunetti, commissario of the Venetian police, confronts a grisly sight when the body of a young man is fished out of the fetid Venetian canal. All the clues point to a violent mugging, but for Brunetti robbery seems altogether too convenient a motive. Then something very incriminating is discovered in the dead man's flat, something which points to the existence of a high level cabal—and Brunetti becomes convinced that somebody, somewhere, is taking great pains to provide a ready-made solution to the crime...

A bomb explodes in the centre of Florence, hitting the car of Chief Superintendent Michele Ferrara of the elite Squadra Mobile. The attack rocks the ancient city to its foundations. Ferrara was clearly the target—and he did, after all, just controversially imprison notorious Mafia boss Salvatore Laprua. A week later, another bomb explodes—bringing tragedy for Ferrara and a determination to find the culprit. But that same morning, Salvatore Laprua is found dead in his prison cell. So who is the mysterious influence behind the bombings—someone even the Mafia fear? An ingenious, gripping mystery, The Death of a Mafia Don has been a bestseller in Italy and across Europe. Written by former Florence police chief Michele Giuttari, it offers a fascinating insight into the secret world of the Mafia, and life in Florence. Originally published in Italian as Il Basilico.

In this collection of nine eerie stories, Iginio Ugo Tarchetti switches effortlessly between the macabre and the effortlessly comical. Set in nineteenth-century Italy, his characters court spirits and blend in with the undead: passionate romances filled with jealousy and devotion are fueled by magic elixirs. Time becomes fluid as characters travel between centuries, chasing affairs that never quite prosper.

After serving years in jail for a crime he didn't commit, Massimo Carlotto received a presidential pardon in 1993. The first book he wrote as a free man was The Fugitive, telling of his years on the run from a politically motivated murder charge. This gritty tale takes readers from the French underworld to a Mexico besieged by guerrilla warfare. Virtually a handbook on how to live life on the lam, The Fugitive is also a vibrant novel full of vivid underworld characters and breathtaking moments that Carlotto recounts in the cool, lucid prose that has become his trademark (Goodreads).

Malombra is a nineteenth-century Gothic novel set near Lake Como in Italy...A young woman living in a castle, comes to believe that she is the returned spirit of a former aristocrat who once live there (Wikipedia).

Inspector Montalbano has charmed readers in nineteen popular novels, and now in Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories, Andrea Camilleri has selected twenty-one short stories, written with his trademark wit and humor, that follow Italy's famous detective through highlight cases of his career. From the title story, featuring a young deputy Montalbano newly assigned to Vigata, to "Montalbano Says No," in which the inspector makes a late-night call to Camilleri himself to refuse an outlandish case, this collection is an essential addition to any Inspector Montalbano fan's bookshelf and a wonderful way to introduce readers to the internationally bestselling series.

An erudite murder mystery set in a fourteenth-century monastery, it is not only a gripping story but also a brilliant exploration of medieval philosophy, history, theology, and logic. In 1327, Brother William of Baskerville is sent to investigate a wealthy Italian abbey whose monks are suspected of heresy. When his mission is overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths patterned on the book of Revelation, Brother William turns detective, following the trail of a conspiracy that brings him face-to-face with the abbey's labyrinthine secrets, the subversive effects of laughter, and the medieval Inquisition. Caught in a power struggle between the emperor he serves and the pope who rules the Church, Brother William comes to see that what is at stake is larger than any mere political dispute-that his investigation is being blocked by those who fear imagination, curiosity, and the power of ideas.

Nineteenth-century Europe—from Turin to Prague to Paris—abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian republicans strangle priests with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate Black Masses at night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. Conspiracies rule history. From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat. But what if, behind all of these conspiracies, both real and imagined, lay one lone man? What if that evil genius created the world's most infamous document?

Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano has become an international sensation whose adventures have been translated from Italian into eight languages, from Dutch to Japanese. The Shape of Water is the first book in this sly, witty, engaging series with its sardonic take on Sicilian life. The goats of Vigata once grazed on the trash-strewn, sirocco-swept site still known as the Pasture. Now local enterprise of a different sort flourishes: drug dealers and prostitutes of every flavor. But their discreet trade is upset when two employees of the Splendor Refuse Collection Company discover the body of engineer Silvio Lupanello, one of the local movers and shakers-apparently deceased in flagrante—at the Pasture. The coroner's verdict is death from natural causes—refreshingly unusual for Sicily. But Inspector Salvo Montalbano, as honest as he is streetwise and as scathing to fools and villains as he is compassionate to their victims, is not ready to close the case-even though he's being pressured by Vigata's police chief, judge, and bishop. Picking his way nimbly through a labyrinth of high-comedy corruption, delicious meals, vendetta fire-power, and carefully planted false clues, Montalbano can be relied on, whatever the cost, to get to the heart of the matter.

The novel is set in the city of Turin, and deals with the investigation of commissioner Santamaria about the murder of an architect of dubious fame, Garrone. Among the protagonists are Anna Carla Dosio, a beautiful and rich woman, and her friend Massimo Campi, a rich homosexual, who, while playing an intellectual game, had the architect Garrone killed in a letter. Later in the novel, Campi's boyfriend, Lello, a municipal clerk who was investigating by himself on the murder, is also killed. In the end of the novel, suspicions against the two are raised when Santamaria discovers that Garrone had been killed for his blackmailing, related to a project for a new quarter of buildings, against an old woman.

In the spare wing of a church-run sanatorium, some zealous youths create "the Library," a space where lonely citizens can read one another's personal diaries and connect with like-minded souls in "dialogues across the ether." But when their scribblings devolve into the ugliest confessions of the macabre, the Library's users learn too late that a malicious force has consumed their privacy and their sanity. As the city of Turin suffers a twenty-day "phenomenon of collective psychosis" culminating in nightly massacres that hundreds of witnesses cannot explain, the Library is shut down and erased from history. That is, until a lonely salaryman decides to investigate these mysterious events, which the citizenry of Turin fear to mention. Inevitably drawn into the city's occult netherworld, he unearths the stuff of modern nightmares: what's shared can never be unshared. An allegory inspired by the grisly neo-fascist campaigns of its day, The Twenty Days of Turin has enjoyed a fervent cult following in Italy for forty years. Now, in a fretful new age of "lone-wolf" terrorism fueled by social media, we can find uncanny resonances in Giorgio De Maria's vision of mass fear: a mute, palpitating dread that seeps into every moment of daily existence. With its stunning anticipation of the Internet—and the apocalyptic repercussions of oversharing—this bleak, prescient story is more disturbingly pertinent than ever.

The Intellectual as a Detective: From Leonardo Sciascia to Roberto Saviano offers a fresh perspective on both Italian crime fiction and the role of the intellectual in Italian society. By analyzing the characterization of men of culture as investigators, this book addresses their social commitment in a period that goes from the Sixties to today. The connection it establishes between fiction and real life makes this book an interesting addition to the debate on crime literature and its social function in Italy. The detectives created by Sciascia, Eco, Pasolini, Saviano and other novelists foster a reflection on how the narrative aspect of characterization has been used in connection with a historical perspective. Thanks to its broad scope, not limited to a single author, this book can be studied in undergraduate and graduate classes on the Italian detective novel, and it can be a helpful resource for scholars interested in characterization and the transforming figure of the intellectual in Italian society.

This volume is the first study in the English language to focus specifically on Italian crime fiction. The chapters, by leading British and North American scholars, trace the history and development of Italian detective and noir fiction from the 1930s to the present, and examine such topics as the representation of space, gender, and the tradition of impegno—the social and political engagement that characterized the Italian cultural and literary scene in the postwar period.

Over the last three decades, Italian crime fiction has demonstrated a trend toward a much higher level of realism and complexity. The origins of the New Italian Epic, as it has been coined by some of its proponents, can be found in the widespread backlash against the Mafia-sponsored murders of Sicilian magistrates which culminated with the assassinations of Judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992. Though beginning in the Italian language, this prolific, popular movement has more recently found its way into the English language and hence it has found a much wider international audience. Following a brief, yet detailed, history of the cultural and economic development of Sicily, this book provides a multilayered look into the evolution of the New Italian Epic genre. The works of ten prominent contemporary writers, including Andrea Camilleri, Michael Dibdin, Elena Ferrante, and Massimo Carlotto, are examined against the backdrop of various historical periods. This "past is prologue" approach to contemporary crime fiction provides context for the creation of these recent novels and enhances understanding of the complex moral ambiguity that is characteristic of anti-mafia Italian crime fiction.

This companion constitutes the first, systematic theorisation of the Italian Gothic. Through an interdisciplinary, trans-medial approach that encompasses prose fiction, poetry, journalism, film, music, and comics, it explores the varied and complex metamorphoses of the Gothic in Italy from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Although the last thirty years have seen a burgeoning in the academic study of the Gothic at college and university levels and in related publications, scholars have long struggled to even acknowledge the very existence of this mode in the Italian context. This companion does not only fill in a historical and critical gap in the scholarship, but it also contributes to revitalising the field of Gothic Studies, opening new channels of communication, and paving the way to the exploration of the fruitful interchanges between Italian and other European and American configurations of the Gothic.

Investigates modes of the reception, rewriting, and appropriation of the gothic and the fantastic in Italy in the late nineteenth century and the second half of the twentieth century. This book articulates the ways in which Italian writers undermined the narrative spaces created by realist narration.

This book comprehensively covers the history of Italian crime fiction from its origins to the present. Using the concept of "moral rebellion," the author examines the ways in which Italian crime fiction has articulated the country's social and political changes. The book concentrates on such writers as Augusto de Angelis (1888-1944), Giorgio Scerbanenco (1911-1969), Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989), Andrea Camilleri (b. 1925), Loriano Macchiavelli (b. 1934), Massimo Carlotto (b. 1956), and Marcello Fois (b. 1960). Through the analysis of writers belonging to differing crucial periods of Italy's history, this work reveals the many ways in which authors exploit the genre to reflect social transformation and dysfunction.

In this book, author David Del Principe asks whether unspeakable truths in their works kept an entire generation of nineteenth-century Italian writers known as the "scapigliati" at the margins of Italian literary life and sparked critics to deride the movement known as Scapigliatura. It is coincidental that issues and themes submerged in their graveyard poetics—physical and psychic transference, sexual identity, vampirism, the supernatural, androgyny, and decadence—have become controversial at the turn of another century while literary and cultural interest in Scapigliatura has reemerged?

The crime genre entered Italy in the late nineteenth century, and if initially Italian authors followed models developed abroad-principally in the United States, England and France—a uniquely Italian brand began to emerge soon. Il giallo, as the crime genre has been known in Italy since the 1930s, proved to be the ideal instrument to confront pressing and often uncomfortable issues which were pertinent to the Italian context: it became a useful tool to restore, symbolically at least, the truth and justice that were, and still are, perceived by a large part of the Italian reading public to be systematically denied in reality. Uncertain Justice explores three broad areas that contemporary Italian noir literature appears particularly keen to debate, retrieving them from the silence to which they might otherwise be consigned: unresolved historical and political legacies, the repercussions of which still inform and affect life and practices in the present times; the problematic institution of the family, considered as the bedrock of Italian culture and the founding principle of Italian society, with specific attendant questions of gender politics; and the justice system seen through some of its operators, nominally in charge of putting the wrongs right and frequently accused of preventing this from happening. These explorations are conducted through an analysis of texts published in the last twenty years, which represent an effort to expose and counter injustice through the power of the word.