Guide to Italian literature – Lonely Planet

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Reading the local literature before you go is a good way to get a greater understanding of a destination. This excerpt from Lonely Planet’s guide to Italy takes you through the highlights.

Italy’s readers are thoroughly spoiled for choice, with gripping gialli (mysteries), ancient classics, magic-realist fables, epic romps through history and, for those romantic occasions, some highly suggestive poetry.

MYSTERY & SUSPENSE

The most popular genre in Italy today dominates Italy’s bestseller list, especially Andrea Camilleri’s cranky but savvy Sicilian inspector Montalbano

CLASSICS

Roman epic poet Virgil decided Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey deserved a sequel, and spent 11 years and 12 books tracking the outbound adventures and inner turmoil of Aeneas, from the fall of Troy to the founding of Rome – and died in 19 BC with just 60 lines to go in his Aeneid.

HISTORICAL EPICS

Italian authors find illumination even in Italy’s darkest hours. Italy’s 19th-century struggle for unification parallels the story of star-crossed lovers in Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), and causes an identity crisis among Sicilian nobility in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il gattopardo (The Leopard).

SOCIAL REALISM

Italy has always been its own sharpest critic, and several 20th-century Italian authors captured their own troubling circumstances with unflinching accuracy. Italy’s most hush-hush subject is Naples’ Camorra crime syndicate, and the romantic whitewash usually applied to Mafioso machinations is stripped clean by Roberto Saviano’s sand-blasting prose in Gomorrah. Though the book was listed as fiction in Italy, Saviano received death threats resulting in his relocation from Italy – and a bold 2008 public denunciation of the Camorra by six Italian Nobel laureates.

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