Open City : Seven Writers in Postwar Rome : Ignazio Silone, Giorgio Bassani, Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, Carlo Levi, Carlo Emili

A magic decade of Italian writing followed the fall of Mussolini’s Fascists 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 Weaver also arrived in Rome in the late 1940s. Open City is an anthology of the writers Weaver admired most, and they all come to life in the pages of his long introductory memoir.