The forty authors on my list hailed from all parts of Italy, though I acknowledge that my base in Rome and my love for southern Italy contributes a slant. They came from rich families and poor ones. They had all sorts of political leanings and varying degrees of political commitment. Stylistically, they covered the spectrum: Realist, neoRealist, avant-garde, fantastic, Modernist, postmodernist. Some cultivated literary fame; others actively shunned it. Many were celebrated, powerful, influential figures. A few never saw their work published in their lifetime.

If there is a dominant point of reference, it is the Second World War. The writer Cristina Campo called it ‘the abyss that had split apart the century’;⁴ indeed, this cataclysmic caesura is what links the vast majority of these authors. Two were in Nazi concentration camps, and another escaped en route to one. At least a dozen were forced to live, for a time, in hiding, either because they were members of the anti-Fascist Resistance, or because they were Jews. The Second World War and its aftermath drastically and irrevocably altered Italian society, penetrating the collective consciousness, traumatizing it, but eventually reinvigorating it culturally and economically. The proliferation of literary magazines after the war, the redoubled and innovative publishing initiatives and the spirit of community and collaboration among writers, means that this time is now regarded as something of a golden age in Italian literary culture. Having said this, and in spite of the myriad personal connections among many of these authors, the anthology contains powerful meditations on alienation, estrangement, states of solitude. The only true common ground for each of these authors is the Italian language, an invention in and of itself, described by Leopardi as ‘piuttosto un complesso di lingue che una sola’ (‘a complex of languages as opposed to a single one’).⁵ It was imposed upon a linguistically and culturally diverse population, late in the nineteenth century, when the separate regions of Italy were unified in the name of national identity.

The roots of the modern Italian short story are themselves hybrid: at once deep and shallow, at once foreign and domestic. In assembling this anthology, one indispensible font of information was the anthology dedicated to the Italian short story in the twentieth century edited by Enzo Siciliano (1934–2006), for Mondadori’s i Meridiani series. Siciliano was a writer, critic and journalist from Rome, and he became the editor of the influential literary journal Nuovi Argomenti after the death of its founder, Alberto Moravia. There are in fact two versions of Siciliano’s anthology: a single volume running to nearly fifteen hundred pages without notes (featuring seventy-one authors, published in 1983) and then across three volumes (with a revised introduction and a grand total of two hundred and ninety-eight authors, including himself, published in 2001).

In his introduction, Siciliano traces the Italian short story back to the Middle Ages, to the anonymously written, thirteenth-century Novellino, containing episodes and characters drawn from the Bible and classical and medieval mythology, to Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (likely composed between 1349 and 1351) and to Matteo Bandello, whose sixteenth-century Novelle (he wrote over two hundred of them) may have inspired the plots of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Much Ado about Nothing via French translation. Between Bandello and Boccaccio one must also acknowledge Masuccio Salernitano, whose own Novellino, a collection of fifty posthumously published tales, included one noted for being among the sources for Romeo and Juliet.