Several members of this group knew one another during their lifetimes. They sustained, influenced, promoted, edited, reviewed and were at odds with one another. They formed part of a community, a network, bound together by vital personal and professional friendships and, in one case, even by marriage. And as I stood back to absorb the details of their lives and the nature of their creativity, I realized that they were all, by and large, hybrid individuals, with multiple proclivities, identities, signatures and shadows. They were writers of fiction and at the same time they were almost always other things: poets, journalists, visual artists, musicians. Many had demanding editorial responsibilities, were critics, were school teachers. Some were professional scientists and politicians. They served in the military, held bureaucratic positions, had diplomatic careers. And the vast majority were translators, living, reading and writing astride two languages or more.

The act of translation, central to their artistic formation, was a linguistic representation of their innate hybridity. The majority of these writers shuttled between dialect and standard Italian; though they all wrote in Italian, it was not necessarily the language they grew up speaking, or the first they learned to read and write in or were originally published in. Four were born outside of present-day Italy, and most of them spent significant amounts of time either studying, travelling or residing abroad. A few turned to other languages, writing novels in French or Portuguese, experimenting with German and English, teaching themselves different dialects, complicating their texts and their identities further still. Whether linguistic or stylistic, their creative paths were marked by experimentation, by wilful mutation. They were artists who questioned and redefined themselves over time, some defiantly distancing themselves from earlier phases of their work.

A central underpinning of their hybridity is manifested in the striking number of invented or altered names. Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym that has taken the literary world by storm, but long before her, Italian writers created alter-egos for political or personal reasons, either to protect themselves from the law or to disassociate themselves from their origins. Eight of the authors on this list were born with different names, and others published specific works under pseudonyms. To rename oneself is to edit one’s destiny, to insist upon an autonomous identity, and for a writer it is a means, quite literally, of rewriting the self. Not surprisingly, many of these stories address the theme of identity, of fluctuating selfhood, and accentuate the issue of naming in particular. Characters have complicated relationships to their names, and a few lack names altogether – perhaps a nod to one of the most intriguing characters in Alessandro Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed (I promessi sposi), who is called is ‘l’innominato’, literally, ‘the unnamed’.

Always pertinent to the discussion of identity is the question of women in Italy: how they were defined, how they were seen. Many of these stories are portraits of women, some confronting and challenging patriarchal ideology, others revealing attitudes in which women are objectified, belittled, maligned. One option, on my part, would have been to exclude such stories in order to protest against these objectionable depictions. But this would misrepresent a society and its history as reflected in its literature. As a woman, and a woman writer, these stories help me to better understand the cultural context of Italian feminism, and to admire the great strides that Italian women have made. The fact of the matter is that many of the most moving depictions of women in this collection were written by men. Marriage is a recurrent theme – to be precise, how a woman’s identity can be altered, compromised and negated by a man, and also by maternity. But the whole of the twentieth century, which witnessed the collapse of a series of powerful social institutions, including marriage, was a laboratory in which individual identities were being lost and found, regained and shed.