What, the reader may ask, is a novellino? It is a book that gathers together various novelle (the plural of novella), which, in Italian, is not a slim novel, but rather, a word used to describe a short story or a tale. Though Boccaccio titled his great work The Decameron, he explicitly refers to the tales themselves as novelle. Siciliano investigates the difference between the term novella and racconto in Italian, seemingly interchangeable terms, both to be differentiated from romanzo, the word for novel. The word racconto, with its Latin root, is etymologically connected to the English ‘recount’: a telling again. A racconto aims to communicate a story, personally and purposefully, to a listener. Thus raconteur, a French word that has also become English, refers specifically to a human figure, a storyteller, especially a captivating one. The spirit of the racconto implies a dynamic relation, with at least two people involved; though distinct from dialogue, it indicates a form, immediate and typically brief, of exchange. In modern Italian, the verb raccontare is commonly used, in conversation, when people want to narrate something casually but colourfully, imbuing this literary term with ongoing quotidian currency. That Siciliano’s anthology promotes the word racconti in the title (Racconti Italiani del Novecento) is in and of itself making a statement, positing the form along a decidedly modern axis where Guy de Maupassant, Gustave Flaubert and Anton Chekhov serve as coordinates, thereby distinguishing the racconto from the more classically rooted novella.

Fleeting by nature, short stories, in spite of their concision and concentration, are infinitely elastic, expansive, probing, elusive – suggesting that the genre itself is essentially unstable, hybrid, even subversive in nature. In discussing Moravia’s Roman Tales, called Racconti romani, and a cornerstone of the twentieth-century Italian short-story tradition, Siciliano cites Moravia’s illuminating observation that a racconto is something born from intuizione, intuition. I agree. In some sense it is the novel, in Italy, which is the interloper, the imported genre. Alessandro Manzoni and Giovanni Verga looked to France and to England for models, Grazia Deledda to the Russians, Italo Svevo to the central European tradition. The novel, according to Moravia, derives from reason, and is imbued with structure, elements that short stories routinely undermine and resist. Indigenous to Italy, racconti have thrived for centuries, and they constitute a continuum, cross-pollinating with the world’s literature in ways that the longer Italian form has not.

Siciliano’s volumes were indispensable to me, travelling back and forth across the Atlantic, those navy-blue bricks with their sewn-in ribbons to mark one’s place lined up on my desk, and I recommend them to those who read Italian and wish to broaden their perception of the short form in Italy. Even for those who don’t read Italian, the index alone, listing all the authors’ names, is the first place I would direct those in search of suggested further reading. To leaf through them is to glimpse the thrilling sweep of the ocean from above, as opposed to navigating the more manageable but partially uncharted bay I have demarcated.