Queer Places:
Via Cisterna del Follo, 1, 44121 Ferrara FE
Cimitero Ebraico
Ferrara, Provincia di Ferrara, Emilia-Romagna, Italy
Giorgio Bassani (4 March 1916 – 13 April 2000) was an Italian novelist, poet, essayist, editor, and international intellectual.
Various references to homosexuality, as well as its symbolic
equivalents of injured or diminished virility, can be found in Giorgio Bassani’s narrative. In this direction, the most
significant texts are considered The Gold Rimmed Glasses (where the tragic hero is an homosexual),
Behind the Door and The Heron, but also the figure of Alberto (and somewhat of the protagonist and
narrator) in The Garden of the Finzi-Contini and of Barilari in One night in ‘43 are the subject of
thematic interpretation. Valter Leonard Puccetti claims that homosexual identity is not investigated itself and
ontologically legitimized by Bassani, but takes the value of a metaphor for exclusion, even a violent
one, as the one that struck, at the same time, Jewish identity after the enactment of Racial Laws in
Italy. From this point of view, the doubt on the “conformity” of his own sexuality, the fear this
sexuality would meet the regime’s propaganda stereotypes, or (in Behind the Door) the liberating
projection of these stereotypes on an antagonistic character and alter ego seem to inhabit the
protagonists of the aforementioned novels and short stories and produce, with their diverted or evaded
questions, the agony of false consciousness.
Bassani was born in Bologna into a prosperous Jewish family of Ferrara, where he spent his childhood with his mother Dora, father Enrico (a doctor), brother Paolo, and sister Jenny. In 1934 he completed his studies at his secondary school, the liceo classico L. Ariosto in Ferrara. Music had been his first great passion and he considered a career as a pianist;[1] 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 (third class) from Ferrara, he studied under the art historian Roberto Longhi. His ideal of the "free intellectual" was the liberal historian and philosopher Benedetto Croce. Despite the anti-Semitic race 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 Jewish School of Ferrara in via Vignatagliata.[2]
In 1940 his first book, Una città di pianura ("A City of the Plain"), 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 after Benito 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 review Botteghe oscure for Princess Marguerite Caetani from its founding in 1948 until it ceased publication in 1960.[3]
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 (the five stories are Lida Mantovani, La passeggiata prima di cena, Una lapide in via Mazzini, Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti, and Una notte del '43).
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 Elena Croce (daughter of Benedetto) who had offered him the manuscript, later became controversial, however; recent editions have been published which follow the manuscript more closely.[4]
Also in 1958 Bassani's novel Gli occhiali d'oro (made into a film in 1987) was published, an examination, in part, of the marginalisation of Jews and homosexuals. Together with stories from Cinque storie ferraresi (reworked and under the new title Dentro le mura (1973)) 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 (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis) (1962, Premio Viareggio prizewinner); Dietro la porta (1964); L'airone (1968) and L'odore del fieno (1972). 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 (Una notte del '43, from Cinque storie ferraresi) was adapted as the film Long Night in 1943.
From 1965 to 1980, Giorgio Bassani was the president of the organization Italia Nostra.[5]
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 (born 1945-09-01) and Enrico (born 1949-06-29). He had been with his companion Portia Prebys, since shortly after they met in 1977.[2]
Bassani received the Charles Veillon, the Strega, the Campiello, the Viareggio and the Nelly Sachs prizes. He collaborated on several screen plays.
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