Franco Baldasso, American Academy in Rome Fellow 2018–19, is an assistant professor of Italian at Bard College and the author of Il cerchio di gesso. Primo Levi narratore e testimone (The chalk circle: Primo Levi, narrator and witness, 2007). He has published widely on Italian and European modern literature and culture, in journals such as Modern Language Notes, Context, Annali d’Italianistica, Allegoria, Poetiche, and Scritture Migranti.
Franco Baldasso
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Writing on Public Books
The Metamorphoses of Alberto Savinio
“Child prodigies usually have the fate of soap bubbles,” wrote Giorgio de Chirico in 1952, before observing that in the case of his recently deceased younger brother …
Ferrante’s Secret Mirror
Last fall’s noisy dispute around Elena Ferrante’s biographical identity ignited a wealth of contrasting yet instructive reactions. Whether troubled or newly admiring or indifferent to the apparent divergences between the empirical author’s life and that of her character Elena Greco, readers and critics did not venture to question the assumed existential parallel between the two. […]
Paying Attention Like Primo Levi: An Interview with Ann Goldstein
Stuart Woolf, a British historian and the first English-language translator of Primo Levi’s Auschwitz memoir If This Is a Man, wrote that Levi’s “interest in the translation of his books was exceptional.”1 This comes as no surprise, given that translation is a fundamental aspect of Levi’s writing, and that he considered it a vital tool in […]
Chronicle of a Soul: Roberto Saviano
“If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” The old adage might be a fit translation of what many Italians thought when Roberto Saviano received death threats from the Camorra (the Neapolitan mafia) after the publication of Gomorrah in 2006. Very few anticipated that the book, an unsparing yet lyrical first-person narrative of Naples’s […]
How Fascism Pushed Women out of the Frame
Italians today tend to draw a firm line between the totalitarian right-wing nationalist regime that ruled the Kingdom of Italy from 1922 to 1943 and the Italian Republic that emerged in its wake. The memory of Fascism and its cult of political violence, however, have never ceased to be timely in the Bel Paese, a […]
Morality and the Italian Civil War: An Interview with Stanislao Pugliese
After more than 20 years, Claudio Pavone’s A Civil War: A History of the Italian Resistance, recognized as a masterpiece of Italian historiography, has been translated into English. Stanislao Pugliese, professor of history at Hofstra University, edited this 700-page magnum opus and added a detailed introduction, making available for the first time to the American […]
Futurist Cheerfulness
In the domain of games and toys, as in all passéist manifestations, one sees only grotesque imitation, timidity (miniature trains, little cars, dolls that can’t move, cretinous caricatures of domestic objects), things that are monotonous and discourage exercise, prone only to dishearten children and make them stupid. — Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero, “Futurist Reconstruction […]
