48 pages • 1 hour read
Giorgio BassaniThe Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1962A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaBackground
Authorial Context: Bassani and the Narrator
The author Giorgio Bassani used his novels to revisit his formative experiences in Ferrara, a city in northeastern Italy, and much of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis was inspired by real events. Born in 1916, Bassani was studying literature in Bologna when Italy passed the antisemitic laws targeting Jewish people. As a Jewish writer, Bassani was forced to publish under a pseudonym during that time, but after the war he found great success writing about fascism, antisemitism, and class. He was not exclusively a novelist, and his mournful and lyrical tone can be found in poetry, screenplays, and essays. While the narrator of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is unnamed, the 1974 film adaptation uses the name Giorgio to pay homage to the author. Both Bassani and the narrator are from Ferrara, and they learn the harsh new realities of fascism in their twenties. Bassani’s own experiences of being expelled from the local tennis club are reflected in the novel. Finally, both the author’s and the narrator’s fathers were members of the fascist party who eventually turned against the party due to the rising antisemitism of the 1930s.
Bassani fled from Ferrara after being jailed in 1943, but this is not depicted in the novel. After surviving the Holocaust, Bassani resumed his literary life in Italy, but he did not return physically to Ferrara as his characters do. The city of Ferrara acknowledges the important status that his novels grant the area, and there are contemporary discussions about building the mythical gardens depicted in this book (Courchay, Diego. “How an Italian Writer’s Imaginary Garden Became a Place of Literary Pilgrimage.” Atlas Obscura, 18 Feb. 2019).
Historical Context: Jewish Rights in Italy
During the events of the novel, the Jewish population of Italy experienced oppression that was connected to but different than that of other European Jews. Many of the discriminatory measures passed in Italy happened before Nazi intervention.
Jewish people were historically oppressed in the region before the unification of Italy. From the 16th century to Italian Unification in 1860, Ferrara, for example, gated off the Jewish community and, as in other places, enforced a curfew by locking them in at night (Courchay). Freedom and citizenship were granted to the Jewish population in 1860. This would have been remembered by some of those experiencing reignited oppression in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1938, the first anti-Jewish laws passed that prevented Jewish children and students from attending public or private Italian schools.
When the Council of Ministers passed the laws featured in the novel, Jewish people were very integrated into Italian society. Between World War 1 and World War 2, 43.7% of Jews married outside the religion (Zimmerman, Joshua D. “Introduction.” Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922-1945, Cambridge University Press, 2005). The shift within the fascist party that led it to turn against its Jewish members was a surprising betrayal. In fact, the Ferrara local representative for the fascist party was a Jewish politician, Renzo Ravenna, who served from 1926 until 1938 (Courchay). Nazi Germany did not directly target Italian Jews until they occupied Italy in 1943; this is connected to many of the deaths in the novel. Before that time, it was fascist racism that oppressed Jewish people on an institutional level. While the rate of survival was higher than in other European countries, two out of every 10 Italian Jews were killed by the end of World War 2 (Zimmerman).
