Massimo Bontempelli

1878–1960

‘Funambolismo’ is a word often used to describe Bontempelli’s art – that of a tightrope walker. Among the most audacious of writers in this volume, he is also the most graceful. Everything Bontempelli wrote was brief, taut, exquisitely controlled. A precursor to Calvino, he was a key figure of the Italian avant-garde, formally anomalous even today. He began working as a school teacher and his first important book, a collection of stories called Sette savi (Seven Sages), was published in 1912. At around forty years of age, after covering the First World War as a correspondent on the front-lines, he went through a form of literary conversion, renouncing much of his preceding work. His new phase began with La vita intensa (The Intense Life), an emphatically experimental and ironic volume which contains ten micro-novels, all set in Milan and published in 1920. In his own preface to the book he declared his intention to ‘renew the European novel’. Much has been said about Bontempelli’s nationalist agenda and early role as Secretary of the Fascist Writers’ Union, his collaboration with Curzio Malaparte,¹ his close friendship with Luigi Pirandello. And yet he refused to accept a university post denied to a Jewish professor in 1938, was forbidden, for the following year, to publish his work, and was forced into hiding in Rome for nine months during the Resistance. In 1937, when he was nearly sixty, he became a companion to the writer Paola Masino, thirty years his junior, who gave up writing to curate all of his work after his death. This story, exuberant, spare and post-apocalyptic, was written after his break with his former style. Describing a virtual reality before the term was invented, its themes are various: the transformation of space, the dividing line between nature and built environments, the contrasting ways that men and women sustain each other and survive. Bontempelli loved music, wrote about it, and composed it. He was also the first to apply ‘magic realism’ – an aesthetic term borrowed from German – to literature.

The Miraculous Beach, or, Prize for Modesty

(Aminta)

Translated by Jenny McPhee

At the first threat, people began to stay off the streets of Rome, then, after a few days, a generalized fear took over and the city itself began to empty out. Seized with fear, hour after hour, the citizens of Rome stormed the train stations, and, shoving their way on to train carriages, had fled far away. The richest people glutted their cars with oil and gas before bolting out of the thirteen city gates and, kicking up dust, headed to the most distant cardinal points.

And so it was for ten days. Then suddenly the train stations were deserted and throughout Rome it was only the peddlers’ carts that raised any dust, the peddlers being afraid of nothing. At that point, no one was left in the metropolis.

Only a few heroes and heroines stayed to watch over the city. At midday, the heroes roamed imperiously through the streets. Jacketless, they allowed the sun to whip their silk shirts to shreds while vainly regarding their reflections in their belt buckles. When seeing each other on opposite pavements, even without knowing one another, they smiled proudly, confident that from Laterano to Monte Mario, from Valle Giulia to Saint Paul’s, their supremacy would last undisturbed and uncontested for at least two months.