Hybridity is also manifested in the number of animal characters that abound in these pages, a recurrent metaphor that calls into question the porous barrier between the animal and human worlds. In this sense, some of these works can trace their lineage to the fables of Aesop, to the Metamorphoses of Ovid and to folkloric tradition, in which the animal kingdom has always played a delightful and prominent role. The significance of animals in literary satire was appreciated by the poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), whose Paralipomeni della Batracomiomachia (translated into English as The War of the Mice and the Crabs) is a mock epic, inspired by an ancient Greek poem, adapted by Leopardi to criticize imperial politics and false patriotism in Italy.² A great number of these stories feature animals that talk, behave, think and feel just as people do. They substitute as friends, lovers, philosophical interlocutors, a spouse. They serve as mirrors and filters that reflect and reveal myriad emotional and psychological states. The reader will note various characters who feel more animal than human, or are themselves both animal and human. The paradoxical valence of animals merits close attention in that they represent both a state of freedom as well as subservience, both innocence and savagery. As these stories make clear, they are creatures both cherished and consumed, both worshipped and sacrificed, beings that both define and question what ‘human’ even means.

In the course of pondering the diverse and intriguing encounters between man and beast in this anthology, I was struck by the following words by Benito Mussolini: ‘Fascism denies the validity of the equation, well-being-happiness, which would reduce men to the level of animals, caring for one thing only – to be fat and well-fed – and would thus degrade humanity to a purely physical existence’.³ This observation, antithetical to the in-between, transversal, protean essence of so many of these writers and their work, also allows us to make room for another, more troubling organizing principle: the reality of Fascism. Giovanni Verga was the first of the authors gathered in these pages to die, in 1922, the year Mussolini marched to power in Rome. All the rest lived under Fascism at some point or another, and were affected directly by its legacy. The ugliest manifestation of Fascism was to dehumanize, to treat people as animals, or worse. The irony of course was that in order to achieve their aims, it was those in power who behaved like beasts.

Fascism, in Italy, was declined linguistically, to the extent of enforcing a ‘pure Italian’ free from foreign words and expressions. Under Fascism a croissant became a cornetto, a bar became a quisibeve (‘here one drinks’) and football, invented by the English, became calcio. Even the pronoun lei (as opposed to voi) was prohibited as a second-person pronoun because it was claimed to be a Spanish grammatical import, and also because it sounded ‘feminine’. In any overview of Italian literature in the twentieth century, the history of the language must come into consideration. The regime sought to standardize and flatten the language, to weed out dialect and other anomalies, above all, to turn it inward. And it was in that very moment that Italy’s writers, at least a considerable number of them, turned defiantly outward. The entire twentieth century can be read as a battle of wills between the wall Fascism sought to erect around Italy and Italian culture, and those – many of the writers represented here very much among them – determined, despite running grave risks, to break it down.