There are a number of Italian texts, both classic and contemporary, that are must-reads for anyone interested in the history, culture, and language of Italy. Whether it's a trip to hell and back, a year's worth of love poems, or ribald, coarse humor during the plague, there's a tale for everyone.
1. A Place to Live
A wide-ranging collection from one of the foremost Italian writers of the 20th century. With an unerring eye and unparalleled eloquence, Natalia Ginzburg observes everything around her, sparing no one, least of all herself. In these essays Ginzburg writes honestly and insightfully about being a writer and mother, being displaced during World War II, and experiencing deprivation in postwar Italy.
2. Canzoniere
Francesco Petrarca, one of the great early Renaissance humanists, wrote love poetry in the vulgar tongue. His Canzoniere had enormous influence on the poets of the 15th and 16th centuries. Head-over-heels in love with Laura, Petrarca wrote 365 sonnets, one passionate poem a day dedicated to his true love.3. Decamerone
Written by the Italian humanist writer Giovanni Boccaccio almost 650 years ago, Il Decamerone contains a hundred tales supposedly told in ten days by a party of ten young people who had fled from the Black Death in Florence. Regarded as his masterpiece and a model for Italian classical prose, its influence on Renaissance literature was enormous.4. Divine Comedy
The poem by Dante, begun in exile in 1306 and allegorically describing the poet's (by implication mankind's) journey through life to salvation. The Commedia is the central and culminating literary work of medieval Europe. It is systematically structured in terza rima, with three cantiche (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso).5. Il Gattopardo
A classic of modern fiction. Set in the 1860s, The Leopard is the spellbinding story of a decadent, dying Sicilian aristocracy threatened by the approaching forces of democracy and revolution. Giuseppe di Lampedusa, also an astronomer and a Sicilian prince, was 58 when he started to write The Leopard, though he had had it in his mind for 25 years.6. Il Principe
The definitive manual of modern politics written by the Italian Renaissance political philosopher Nicolò Machiavelli almost 500 years ago.7. I Promessi Sposi
Alessandro Manzoni's powerfully characterized historical reconstruction of plague-ravaged 17th-century Lombardy. The simple attempts of two poor silkweavers to marry is used to explore the corrupt and oppressive rule of the Spaniards and, by implication, of the later Austrians. The novel also forged from Tuscan the literary Italian which, after the unification of Italy, became standard Italian.8. Orlando Furioso
A romance epic by the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto. Orlando goes mad because his lady, Angelica, marries a Moorish youth, but he is cured in time to defeat Agramante, king of Africa, who has been besieging Paris. Ariosto invents fantastic episodes and complicated romantic intrigues and adventures.9. Sei Personaggi in Cerca d'Autore
Play in three acts by Luigi Pirandello, produced and published in Italian in 1921. Introducing Pirandello's device of the "theater within the theater," the play explores various levels of illusion and reality. It had a great impact on later playwrights, particularly such practitioners of the Theater of the Absurd as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Jean Genet.10. The Wine-Dark Sea
A collection of thirteen stories written by Leonardo Sciascia between 1959 and 1972, they offer a kind of capsule history of Sicily, ranging through several hundred years and engaging the country's events from their exhilarating and terrible underside.