What is The Garden of the Finzi-Continis about?

Giorgio Bassani's novel was published by Einaudi in 1962 and won the Viareggio Prize, according to the Italian Wikipedia entry. It is set in Ferrara, Bassani's own city, and it is the natural place to start with him.

What happens, without spoiling it

The novel opens in 1957, with the narrator visiting the Etruscan tombs at Cerveteri. The ancient graves send his mind back to the Finzi-Continis, a rich and reserved Ferrara family who live behind the walls of their garden.

From there the story moves back to the years 1929 to 1938. The narrator, an unnamed young man from a middle-class Jewish family, has known the Finzi-Continis only from a distance. When the racial laws of 1938 exclude Jewish members from the city's tennis club, the family opens its own court and garden to a group of young people, and he finally passes through the wall. He falls for Micòl, the family's daughter, and hopes for something she may not be able to give.

The reader knows from the first pages that this world will not last. That knowledge shades everything, and it is why the book is so moving: every afternoon of tennis, every conversation in the garden, is already a memory.

What it is really about

Memory. The whole novel is a looking back, and Bassani is interested in how memory selects, idealises and protects. The older narrator looks at his younger self with a mixture of tenderness and irony.

First love. The romance with Micòl is a wonderfully drawn portrait of unrequited love: tender, frustrating and very funny in places about the self-absorption of being young.

A place. Ferrara is almost a character, and the garden becomes a world apart from the city outside its walls.

A vanishing world. The book is set as an injustice closes in on a community, and Bassani lets that history press on the edges of the story rather than taking it over. According to the Italian Wikipedia entry, the family was loosely inspired by a real Ferrara family who did not survive the war.

Which translation

There are three main English versions, listed on Wikipedia's entry for the novel: Isabel Quigly's (1965), William Weaver's (1974) and Jamie McKendrick's for Penguin (2007). Any of them will serve you well. The most recent is the easiest to find in shops.

The film

Vittorio De Sica's 1970 film won the Golden Bear in Berlin and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Bassani worked on the screenplay but later withdrew his name over changes he had not approved. It is worth seeing, but it is not the book: the novel's long inner life of memory is very hard to film. Read the book first if you can. Our page on book before film has more on why.

How to read it

• Slowly. It is not long, but it is built from moods and details. Evenings, not commutes.
• Read the prologue twice. Once at the start and once at the end. It frames everything.
• Do not expect plot twists. The tension comes from what you already know, not from what you do not.