reading

Introduction

If you were to tell someone who had never read The Garden of the Finzi-Continis that it’s an extraordinary study of first love, you might just be taken on trust. If you claimed Giorgio Bassani combines such a story with a subtle portrait of the artist in his youth, a kind of Künstlerroman, you might be straining credibility. – Another Proust perhaps? But it doesn’t end there. The book is also one of the great novels of witness to the dark years of the mid-twentieth century. For informing both of these interwoven stories, shadowing them, is the fate of a small community of Jews in Ferrara, to which the narrator and his beloved Micòl belong, leading up to and following the 1938 Racial Laws in Italy. The book does indeed find a way to represent this double maelstrom, the personal and the public, the individual and the historical, from which the narrator emerges as a grief-stricken survivor, but a survivor committed to memorializing, in the most durable form he can, the exact features of his experience.

Memory is at the heart of the novel, and the heart’s own memory is put to the fore in the epigraph from Alessandro Manzoni: ‘… what does the heart know? Just the least bit about what has happened already.’ We are told in the Prologue that the main events of the novel are recounted by a narrator looking back some twenty years and impelled by his sense of loss. Within the story itself, after a mere few weeks of absence from the Finzi-Continis’ house, the narrator already suffers anxiety concerning ‘those sites that belonged to a past which, though it seemed remote, was still recuperable, was not yet lost’. Throughout we sense the inexorable need of the narrator, and through him of Bassani himself, to recover the full import of what he has lived through. Ever further away, and harder of access, the past continues to exist in all its vividness. That the novel is (at least in part) fiction does not for Bassani represent an obstacle to truth-telling, rather it enforces a deeper obligation to accuracy. He speaks tellingly in an interview of having ‘written and rewritten every page [of his work] … with the intention to tell the truth, the whole truth’, and this remark seems especially apt for The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.

Writing did not come easily to Bassani. It was, by his own account, an arduous process, alternately urged on and put off by long bicycle rides. In this novel the narrator’s bike is rarely absent, and yet no trace of the struggle of composition remains. Effectively Bassani began, as he continued, a poet; and though prose became his essential medium he kept faith with that beginning. Never ‘poetic’ – by which we usually understand vague and decorative – his prose was always poetry by other means. There is a constant tact and luminous exactitude in all his writing. And especially in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis the reader encounters that rare thing in the novel: a shaped conception that lyrically heightens every element of the story. Bassani himself tells how several stories were resolved by comprehending the images that underpinned them: in one, for example, he saw two spheres moving on conflicting axes, in another parallel lines receding into the distance. This discloses something distinctive about his imagination, a kind of geometric faculty. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis itself may be seen as a series of circular forms, circles within circles, and circles which overlap.

Most of his novels and stories were written in Rome but were almost exclusively set in, or rather centred on, Ferrara. Although he was born – he claims ‘accidentally’ – in Bologna in 1916, it was Ferrara, a small, ancient city in the Po Valley, that was his imaginative heartland, his patria and matrix. Bassani’s first foray into fiction refers to the unnamed Ferrara ominously as ‘A City of the Plain’. (To evade the Racial Laws, this was published in 1940 under the pseudonym of Giacomo Marchi.) Another early story merely calls Ferrara ‘F’. It seems as though his image of the city needed gradually to mature both as actual location and as imaginative entity, almost as a character, before he allowed it to assume its proper name in his fiction. In 1973, more than a decade after the publication of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, he began to see that his short stories, two collections of them, and his four novels all formed parts of a (hexagonal) composite whole, and with this in mind they were adjusted and assembled into a single inclusive work: Il romanzo di Ferrara, The Novel of Ferrara.

Although as free-standing as the other novels, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini, 1962) is a central work within this sequence of interconnected narratives. Leaving aside the short stories, the other novels include The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles (Gli occhiali d’oro, 1958), a short masterpiece which charts the friendship between Bassani’s young Jewish narrator and a homosexual doctor, both of whom are pushed to the margins of an increasingly intolerant Fascist Ferrara; Behind the Doors (Dietro la porta, 1964), a dark, uneasy tale of schoolboy friendship and betrayal; and The Heron (L’airone, 1968), a chilling study of post-war bitterness and malaise. None of these stories, written in this (for Bassani) astonishingly productive decade, needs the buttressing or support of the others, and yet they share a restricted historical period (essentially that of Italian Fascism and its post-war submergence), a civic setting and a number of central characters. Among these characters, the first three novels, including the present one, also share an unnamed first-person narrator, who is, I think we are meant to assume, a version, but an earlier version – with all the fictive latitude that word implies – of Bassani himself.

The Prologue to The Garden of the Finzi-Continis begins with a visit to an Etruscan cemetery at Cerveteri, and the novel proper in Ferrara’s Jewish cemetery at the Finzi-Continis’ lavish and histrionic tomb. Cemeteries and gardens alternate through the narrative, the former almost spectrally superimposed on the latter. Only in the Prologue and Epilogue (and once in the middle) does the narrator allude to the fact that nearly all of its protagonists will be murdered in German death camps, without a gravestone to recall their existence. Yet the story continually broods on what passes away and what remains, on time itself, and builds a memorial out of ruination.

Within the novel Bassani makes a number of references to the remarkable history of the Jews in Ferrara. Their presence there is first documented in 1227. In the 1490s, under the powerful d’Este family which ruled Ferrara for three hundred years, the city welcomed and benefited from the influx of Spanish Jews and, early in the next century, of persecuted German Jews. The latter group especially, as Bassani mentions, retained something of their distinct identity. This period of tolerance came to an end when in 1598 the city fell under the control of the Papal Legations and the community was forced within the Ghetto, a triangle of streets – Via Mazzini, Via Vignatagliata and Via Vittoria – which are central to the novel. Apart from a brief respite under Napoleon (1797–9) and again in 1848, the Ghetto remained as such until the Unification of Italy in 1859. The emancipation of the Jews at that date marked a new era of hope and optimism for the community which would come to a sinister and largely unforeseen close in 1938 with the introduction of the Racial Laws.

According to Bassani, before the war there were about seven hundred and fifty Jews living in Ferrara, of whom one hundred and eighty-three were deported to German death camps, mostly under the puppet Salò Republic in 1943. Bassani elsewhere recounts an event which foreshadowed this disaster. On 28 October 1941, after a rally commemorating the March on Rome, a Fascist mob, largely composed of students, broke into the Temple in Via Mazzini at Ferrara, the oldest synagogue still in use in Italy. They attacked the rabbi and his family in their apartment and then broke into the two synagogues or ‘Schools’ housed on separate floors. They destroyed the furnishings and ritual objects, the chandeliers, the marble banisters, the paving stones, the big cupboards holding the scrolls of the Torah, even the cases with the prayer shawls, or tallitot. Although this event is not mentioned in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, it nevertheless reverberates throughout, and may account for the extraordinarily vivid and moving evocation of the Italian synagogue early in the novel and for the focal recurrence of the Temple throughout.

The description of the Temple reveals another aspect of Bassani’s unique gift: his architectural sense of space and his visual acuteness. (A formative friendship for the young Bassani was with his tutor at Bologna University, the great art critic Roberto Longhi.) This too is related to his ‘geometric’ imagination. But in Bassani space is always faceted by time, and description is never uncoupled from the narrative movement, slowed down as it may be, towards what will occur. Even stylistically, in his prolonged sentences, often interrupted by parentheses, we sense a counter-impulse to slow time down, to savour as much as is humanly possible of its fullness, before it pushes on towards a vanishing point of loss and destruction. Here his instinct as a novelist is very like the tennis games he describes in the Finzi-Continis’ garden, which continue on past dusk into the darkness with a stubborn refusal to abandon the joy of playing.

Throughout the novel the Jewish community is presented as both united and divided. In addition to the shadowy group that attend the Fanese synagogue, there is the already mentioned distinction between the two synagogues within the Temple: the German ‘School’ with its stolid, Homburg-hatted congregation and the more operatic and volatile Italian ‘School’. There are also linguistic differences which can be seen even within the Finzi-Contini family itself: in the uncles and grandmother who speak a peculiar Hispanic-Veneto dialect, the Professor with his courtly scholastic Italian and Micòl who, on matters close to her heart, abandons Italian for Ferrarese dialect. And there are also the social divisions which keep the very wealthy Finzi-Continis, perhaps against their will, aloof from the congregation. The narrator despairs of explaining these complexities to his Gentile friends and yet the novel achieves this feat with spectacular success.

Politically, too, this community is seen as divided. Bassani is unsparing in his account of these divisions which cut across it in unpredictable ways. The narrator’s father, like many of his Ferrarese co-religionists, and for that matter like so many fellow Italians, is an enthusiastic Fascist, and unjustly finds Professor Ermanno’s anti-Fascism yet another snobbish taint. Bassani’s refusal to portray a folkish and homogeneous community is an important part of his contract with memory. He insists on their ‘normality’ in the light of a brutal reality that would have them abnormal, or even sub-normal. They have a categorical specialness forced upon them. A figure like the narrator’s father, for example, is certainly flawed but no less lovable for his quirks and failings – despite his deluded views, we can sympathize with him when the narrator self-righteously takes him to task on that account. Though Bassani himself was a militant anti-Fascist, and was jailed in 1943 for his activities – an experience he refers to, only once and laconically, in the novel – his morality never submits to a black-and-white historical overview. Such a view stands accused in the person of Giampi Malnate, even if the accusation is tempered with affection. (It is one of the story’s crueller ironies that the Communist Malnate should in the end die fighting for Fascism on the Russian Front.) Yet nothing that these complexities introduce alleviates the novel’s grief at the loss of this community.

Just as the Jews of Ferrara are far from unified, so also other social divisions beyond that community mark the narrator’s consciousness. He is aware of his exclusion, not on grounds of race but of class, from other groups within the city and the country. In the Prologue, he notes the camaraderie of the working-class girls who, arms linked, block the road in a small Lazian town, singing. They have a carefree, erotic presence that challenges the older narrator, and leaves him as an outsider, a bystander, an admirer. Something of the same thing can be found in the digression on vertigo, as he prepares to scale the garden’s wall. Here, he remembers his childhood admiration for the fearless workers – farm-workers, builders, labourers, ‘frog-catchers and catfish anglers’ who venture up and down the steep climb of the Montagnone fortifications. As a child, he feels threatened by them, by their rough hands and wine-dark breath, and both repelled and attracted. Among several deftly drawn portraits, the foul-mouthed Tuscan girl, who queens it over her coconut shy in the travelling circus and is so taken by the manly Malnate, exerts a magnetic attraction for the narrator. The comic and grotesque figure of Perotti, doorman, coachman and chauffeur of the Finzi-Continis, is another signal presence. He is the employee who seems to have acquired a sinister control over the family, and casts a shadow over the idyllic house and grounds. Only when the narrator begins to fathom Perotti’s tense, vicarious pride in the Finzi-Continis’ possessions is he accorded a flicker of appeal. Though the novel’s milieu is mainly upper middle class, Bassani brings a psychological definition and credibility to every character he portrays.

In keeping with the ethnic variety within Ferrara’s small Jewish community, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is dizzyingly multilingual. Apart from its original Italian, the uncles’ curious dialect and the frequent phrases in Ferrarese, we encounter Malnate’s Milanese, words and phrases in Hebrew, Yiddish, Latin, German, as well as English and French. Bassani’s use of these background languages never serves as linguistic display, but rather as an exact record of a uniquely complex community which, at one point, he describes by the Latin phrase ‘intra muros’ (literally ‘between walls’ or cloistered, but here with the sense of being within a ghetto). This phrase is picked up in Inside the Walls (Dentro le mura), the first book of his Novel of Ferrara, a collection of short stories. Also within The Garden of the Finzi-Contini walls are ever-present and more than structural. They, the walls of the city, its towers, bastions and its underground, tomb-like arsenals begin to gather an increasing symbolic freight. There is a very real sense in which for this community the Racial Laws of 1938 meant the walls were closing in.

To present a novel so sustainingly full of life as something walled-in and sepulchral would be very misleading. The imagery that Bassani has found to capture states of enchantment is most powerfully centred on the Finzi-Continis’ garden, the Barchetto del Duca itself. Unspoilt, Edenic, spacious, with all its botanical profusion, the garden seems to hold out against this sense of constriction. The city itself is a mixture of open vistas and cramped enclosures, but there is nothing forced about the symbolism that suffuses Bassani’s Ferrara, from the dizzy parapets of Montagnone to the curious earthworks that undermine the city walls.

In the novel we can see how the walls themselves inscribe circles within circles. The smaller walled circle of the garden of the Finzi-Continis meets the outer circle of the city walls at the Mura degli Angeli (the Wall of Angels). It is here, where the circumferences of these two walls almost touch, that the charged childhood meeting between the narrator and Micòl takes place. Instead of entering the garden, he becomes distracted by the underground world of the chamber where he hides his bike. This mound was the former repository for the Renaissance city’s arms, and is now a gloomy echo-chamber which wraps the narrator in a state of childish erotic reverie in which he imagines all kinds of intricate and absurd complications in his future. It is at exactly the same point that he arrives at the end of the novel: uninvited and furtive, he enters by night and then pursues a train of desecrating imaginings that seal his separation from Micòl. (As readers, we never know whether these suspicions on her account have any foundation, another example of the author’s – as opposed to the narrator’s – tact.) But the novel explores a whole series of intersecting and enclosing circles. The Commercial Club, as I’ve translated Il Circolo dei Negozianti, is literally a ‘Circle’ which his father belonged to and is expelled from in the wake of the Racial Laws. Based on the actual ‘Marfisa’ club, from which Bassani (an excellent tennis player and tournament winner) was himself excluded, the Eleonora d’Este Tennis Club is, in the original, another Circolo from which the narrator is expelled along with all other Jewish players. They are then invited to play on the Finzi-Continis’ court, and it is at this point that the narrator, ten years after his failed attempt, finally enters the garden for the first time. But the walls of the city enclose other walls, including the huddle of streets that constituted the old Ghetto. The Jewish community itself comprises not just one but several circles that have some overlap yet remain distinct.

One source of the present novel’s extraordinary resonance is a series of almost subliminal interior echoes and parallels which testify to Bassani’s poetic imagination at work. The narrator who will finally, in writing this story, give an account of his community has two examples before him, neither of whom adequately fulfils the role he seeks and yet both of whom supply him with the necessary nourishment to undertake the task. First there is his father, a kind of oral historian of the community, who mixes extempore stories from the past with riffs of sparkling and malicious gossip. Then there is Professor Ermanno Finzi-Contini, a kind of elective father, more bowed and solemn and antiquarian, who modestly alludes to his own researches into Italian Jewry, and offers the use of his library to the narrator for his thesis, hoping the latter might take up where he left off. Although the narrator follows neither of these offered paths or precedents, his own procedure somehow includes and honours both.

As with the parallel play of cemeteries and gardens, we find similar though less conspicuous structurings throughout. Towards the end of the novel, for example, the narrator conducts two crucial bedside conversations. The first is with Micòl, ill with flu, propped up in her bed, half outside the blankets. During this talk, he finally confronts the hopelessness of his desires. The second, some chapters later, is with his now insomniac father, tormented with worry and self-reproach, also sitting up in bed with his chest outside the sheet. For the narrator, this conversation effects an emotional reconciliation with his father (and also, in a way, with himself). These parallel scenes dealing with loss and restoration have an uncanny resonance and an indelible emotional impact.

As a remarkable account of first love, the novel manages to be both idyllic and psychologically convincing; and at the same time harrowingly aware of separation and loss. It is also a study of a developing consciousness. We intimately observe his time at school and university, and his first literary and artistic enthusiasms both for the past and the present age, notably Ungaretti, Montale, Saba and Morandi. The novel traces the narrator’s aesthetic and political formation – the two aspects, however uncomfortably, are always wedded. And yet, though the ‘I’ of the narrator is continually to the fore, Bassani’s alter ego is anything but triumphant. He can be priggish, petulant and self-abasing, defeated by trivialities and by his own timidity. The narrator, and by implication the artist, is never lifted above his milieu. One of the most remarkable features of this novel is how his own failures are made so apparent. It is finally Micòl, artistically a dilettante and politically all but indifferent, who is seen to have a prescience about life, a precocious knowingness about erotic love – for which tennis, once again, supplies the most memorable image – and an unobstructed view of the past, the present and the future that is denied to the other characters, the narrator included.

For many years I have wanted to write about the Finzi-Continis – about Micòl and Alberto, Professor Ermanno and Signora Olga – and about the many others who lived at, or like me frequented, the house in Corso Ercole I d’Este, Ferrara, just before the last war broke out. But the impulse, the prompt, really to do so only occurred for me a year ago, one April Sunday in 1957.

It was during one of our usual weekend outings. Ten or so friends piled into a couple of cars, and we set out along the Aurelia soon after lunch without any clear destination. A few kilometres from Santa Marinella, intrigued by the towers of a medieval castle which suddenly appeared on our left, we had turned into a narrow unpaved track, and ended up walking in single file, stretched out along the desolate sandy plain at the foot of the fortress – this last, when considered close up, was far less medieval than it had promised to be from the distance, when from the motorway we had made out its profile against the light and against the blue, blazing desert of the Tyrrhenian sea. Battered by the head-on wind, and deafened by the noise of the withdrawing tide, and without even being able to visit the castle’s interior, as we had come without the written permit granted by some Roman bank or other, we felt deeply discontented and annoyed with ourselves for having wanted to leave Rome on such a day, which now on the seashore proved little less than wintry in its inclemency.

We walked up and down for some twenty minutes, following the curve of the bay. The only person of the group who seemed at all joyful was a little nine-year-old girl, daughter of the young couple in whose car I’d been driven. Electrified by the wind, the sea, the crazy swirls of sand, Giannina was giving vent to her happy expansive nature. Although her mother had tried to forbid it, she had rid herself of shoes and socks. She rushed into the waves that beat on the shore, and let them splash her legs above the knee. In short, she seemed to be having a great time – so much so that, a bit later, back in the car, I saw a shadow of pure regret pass over her vivid black eyes that shone above her tender, heated little cheeks.

Having reached the Aurelia again, after a short while we caught sight of the fork in the road that led to the Cerveteri. Since it had been decided we should return immediately to Rome, I had no doubt that we would keep straight on. But instead of doing so, our car slowed down more than was required, and Giannina’s father stuck his hand out of the window, signalling to the second car, about twenty-five metres behind, that he intended to turn left. He had changed his mind.

So we found ourselves taking the smooth narrow asphalted street which in no time leads to a small huddle of mainly recent houses, and from there winds on further towards the hills of the hinterland up to the famous Etruscan necropolis. No one asked for any explanations, and I too remained silent.

Beyond the village the street, in gentle ascent, forced the car to slow down. We then passed close by the so-called montarozzi which have been scattered across that whole stretch of Lazian territory north of Rome, but more those parts towards the hills than towards the sea, a stretch which is, therefore, nothing but an immense, almost uninterrupted cemetery. Here the grass is greener, thicker and darker coloured than that of the plain below, between the Aurelia and the Tyrrhenian sea – as proof that the eternal sirocco, which blows from across the sea, arrives up here having shed en route a great part of its salty freight, and that the damp air of the not too far-off mountains begins to exercise its beneficent influence on the vegetation.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Giannina.

Husband and wife were sitting in the front seat with the child in between them. Her father took his hand off the wheel and let it rest on his daughter’s dark brown curls.

‘We’re going to have a look at some tombs which are more than four or five thousand years old,’ he replied, with the tone of someone who is about to tell a fairy tale, and so doesn’t mind exaggerating as far as numbers go. ‘The Etruscan tombs.’

‘How sad,’ Giannina sighed, leaning her neck on the back of the seat.

‘Why sad? Haven’t they taught you who the Etruscans were at school?’

‘In the history book, the Etruscans are at the beginning, next to the Egyptians and the Jews. But, Papa, who d’you think were the oldest, the Etruscans or the Jews?’

Her father burst out laughing.

‘Try asking that gentleman,’ he said, signalling towards me with his thumb.

Giannina turned round. With her mouth hidden behind the back of the seat, severe and full of diffidence, she cast a quick glance at me. I waited for her to repeat the question. But no word escaped her. She quickly turned round again and stared in front of her.

Descending the street, always at a slight gradient and flanked by a double row of cypresses, we came upon a group of country folk, lads and lasses. It was the Sunday passeggiata. With linked arms, some of the girls at times made exclusively female chains of five or six. How strange they look, I said to myself. At the moment we passed them, they peered through the windows with their laughing eyes, in which curiosity was mingled with a bizarre pride, a barely concealed disdain. How strange they looked, how beautiful and free.

‘Papa,’ Giannina asked once again, ‘why are old tombs less sad than new ones?’

A yet more numerous brigade than those that had passed us earlier, which took up almost the whole thoroughfare, and sang in chorus without thinking of giving way, had almost brought the car to a halt. Her father put the car into second gear as he thought about this.

‘Well,’ he replied, ‘the recent dead are closer to us, and so it makes sense that we care more about them. The Etruscans, they’ve been dead such a long time’ – once again he lapsed into the fairy-tale voice – ‘it’s as though they’d never lived, as though they were always dead.’

Another pause, this time a longer one. At the end of which – we were already very close to the widened space in front of the necropolis’s entrance packed with cars and mopeds – it was Giannina’s turn to become the teacher.

‘But now that you say that,’ she gently put it, ‘it makes me think the opposite, that the Etruscans really did live, and that I care about them just as much as about the others.’

The whole visit to the necropolis that followed was infused by the extraordinary tenderness of this remark. It had been Giannina who had helped us understand. It was she, the youngest, who in some way led us all by the hand.

We went down into the most important tomb, the one reserved for the noble Matuta family: a low underground living room which accommodated a score of funeral beds disposed within the same number of niches carved in the tufa walls, and densely adorned with painted murals that portrayed the dear departed, everyday objects from their lives, hoes, rakes, axes, scissors, spades, knives, bows, arrows, even hunting dogs and marsh birds. And in the meantime, having willingly discarded any vestige of historical scruple, I was trying to figure out exactly what the assiduous visits to their suburban cemetery might have meant to the late Etruscans of Cerveteri, the Etruscans of the era after the Roman conquest.

Just as, still today, in small Italian provincial towns, the cemetery gate is the obligatory terminus of every evening passeggiata, they came from the inhabited vicinity almost always on foot – I imagined – gathered in groups of relatives and blood kindred, or just of friends, perhaps in brigades of youths similar to those we had met head-on in the street before, or else in pairs, lovers, or even alone, to wander among the conical tombs, hulking and solid as the bunkers German soldiers vainly scattered about Europe during the last war, tombs which certainly resembled, from outside as much as from within, the fortress dwellings of the living. Yes, everything was changing – they must have told themselves as they walked along the paved way which crossed the cemetery from one end to the other, the centre of which, over centuries of wear, had been gradually incised by the iron wheel-rims of their vehicles, leaving two deep parallel grooves. The world was not as it once was, when Etruria, with its confederation of free, aristocratic city-states, dominated almost the entire Italic peninsula. New civilizations, cruder and less aristocratic, but also stronger and more warlike, by this stage held the field. But in the end, what did it matter?

Once across the cemetery’s threshold, where each of them owned a second home, and inside it the already prepared bed-like structure on which, soon enough, they would be laid alongside their forefathers, eternity did not perhaps appear to be such an illusion, a fable, an hieratic promise. The future could overturn the world as it pleased. There, all the same, in the narrow haven devoted to the family dead, in the heart of those tombs where, together with the dead, great care had also been taken to furnish many of the things that made life beautiful and desirable; in that corner of the world, so well defended, adorned, privileged, at least there (and one could still sense their idea, their madness, after twenty-five centuries, among the conical tombs covered with wild grass), there at least nothing could ever change.

When we left it was dark.

From Cerveteri to Rome is not that far, normally an hour by car would be enough. That evening, however, the journey was not so short. Halfway, the Aurelia began to be jammed with cars coming from Ladispoli and from Fregene. We had to proceed almost at a walking pace.

But once again, in the quiet and torpor (even Giannina had fallen asleep), I went over in my memory the years of my early youth, both in Ferrara and in the Jewish cemetery at the end of Via Montebello. I saw once more the large fields scattered with trees, the gravestones and trunks of columns bunched up more densely along the surrounding and dividing walls, and as if again before my eyes, the monumental tomb of the Finzi-Continis. True, it was an ugly tomb – as I’d always heard it described from my earliest childhood – but never less than imposing, and full of significance if for no other reason than the prestige of the family itself.

And my heartstrings tightened as never before at the thought that in that tomb, established, it seemed, to guarantee the perpetual repose of its first occupant – of him, and his descendants – only one, of all the Finzi-Continis I had known and loved, had actually achieved this repose. Only Alberto had been buried there, the oldest, who died in 1942 of a lymphogranuloma, whilst Micòl, the daughter, born second, and their father Ermanno, and their mother Signora Olga, and Signora Regina, her ancient paralytic mother, were all deported to Germany in the autumn of 1943, and no one knows whether they have any grave at all.

1

The tomb was huge, solid and truly imposing, a kind of temple, something of a cross between the antique and the oriental, such as might be encountered in those stage-sets of Aida or Nabucco very much in vogue at our theatres only a few years back. In any other cemetery, including the neighbouring municipal cemetery, a grave of such pretensions would not have provoked the slightest wonder, might even, mixed in among the rest, have gone unheeded. But in ours it stood out alone. And so, although it loomed some way from the entrance gate, at the end of an abandoned field where for more than half a century no one had been buried, it made an eye-catching show of itself.

It seems that a distinguished professor of architecture – responsible for many other eyesores in the city – had been commissioned to construct it by Moisè Finzi-Contini, Alberto and Micòl’s paternal great-grandfather, who died in 1863, shortly after the annexation of the Papal States’ territories to the Kingdom of Italy, and the resulting final abolition, in Ferrara as well, of the Jewish ghettos. A big landowner, ‘Reformer of Ferrarese Agriculture’ – as could be read on the plaque, eternalizing his merits as ‘an Italian and a Jew’, that the Community had had set above the third landing on the staircase of the Temple in Via Mazzini – but clearly a man of dubious artistic taste: once he’d decided to establish a tomb sibi et suis he’d have let the architect do as he liked. Those were fine and flourishing years – everything seemed to favour hope, liberality and daring. Overwhelmed by the euphoria of civic equality that had been granted, the same that in his youth, at the time of the Cisalpine Republic,¹ had made it possible for him to acquire his first thousand hectares of reclaimed land, it was easy to understand how this rigid patriarch had been induced, in such solemn circumstances, to spare no expense. It is likely that the distinguished professor of architecture was given a completely free hand. And with all that marble at his disposal – white Carrara, flesh-pink marble from Verona, black-speckled grey marble, yellow marble, blue marble, pale green marble – the man had, in his turn, obviously lost his head.

What resulted was an extraordinary mishmash into which flowed the architectonic echoes of Theodoric’s mausoleum at Ravenna, of the Egyptian temples at Luxor, of Roman baroque, and even, as the thickset columns of the peristyle proclaimed, of the ancient Greek constructions of Cnossos. But there it stood. Little by little, year after year, time, which in its way always adjusts everything, had managed to make even that unlikely hotchpotch of clashing styles somehow in keeping. Moisè Finzi-Contini, here declared ‘the very model of the austere and tireless worker’, passed away in 1863. His wife, Allegrina Camaioli, ‘angel of the hearth’, in 1875. Then in 1877, still youthful, their only son, Doctor of Engineering Menotti, followed more than twenty years later in 1898, by his consort Josette, from the Treviso branch of the baronial family of the Artoms. Thereafter the upkeep of the chapel, which gathered to itself in 1914 only one other family member, Guido, a six-year-old boy, had clearly fallen to those less and less inclined to tidy, maintain and repair any damage whenever that was required, and above all to fight off the persistent inroads made by the surrounding weeds that were besieging it. Tufts of swarthy, almost black grass of a near-metallic consistency, and ferns, nettles, thistles, poppies were allowed to advance and invade with ever greater licence. So much so that in 1924, in 1925, some sixty years from its founding, when as a baby I happened to see the Finzi-Continis’ tomb for the first time – ‘a total monstrosity’, as my mother, holding my hand, never failed to call it – it already looked more or less as it does today, when for many years there has been no one left directly responsible for its upkeep. Half drowned in wild green, with its many-hued marble surfaces, originally polished and shining, dulled with drifts of grey dust, the roof and outer steps cracked by baking sunlight and frosts, even then it seemed changed, as every long-submerged object is, into something rich and strange.

Who knows from what, and why, a vocation for solitude is born. The fact remains that the same isolation, the very separateness with which the Finzi-Continis surrounded their deceased, also surrounded the other house they owned, the one at the end of Corso Ercole I d’Este. Immortalized by Giosuè Carducci and Gabriele D’Annunzio, this Ferrara street is so well known to lovers of art and poetry the world over that any description of it would only be superfluous. As is well known, it is in the very heart of that northern zone of the city which the Renaissance added to the cramped medieval quarters, and which for that reason is called the Addizione Erculea.² Broad, straight as a sword from the Castello to the Mura degli Angeli, flanked its whole length by the sepia bulk of upper-class residences, with its distant, sublime backdrop of red bricks, green vegetation and sky, which really seems to lead you on towards the infinite: Corso Ercole I d’Este is so handsome, such is its touristic renown, that the joint Socialist-Communist administration, responsible to the Ferrara Council for more than fifteen years, has recognized the obligation to leave it be, to defend it against any and every possible disruption by speculative building or commercial interests, in short to conserve the whole original aristocratic character of the place.

It is a famous street: and what is more, it remains effectively undisturbed.

All the same, with particular reference to the Finzi-Contini house, although one can reach it even today from Corso Ercole I – unless you want to add on more than half a kilometre across a huge clearing, barely or not at all cultivated; and although this still incorporates the historic ruins of a sixteenth-century building, once a residence or extensive ‘pleasure dome’, which were acquired, as usual, by the same Moisè in 1850, and later transformed by his heirs, through a series of adaptations and restorations, into an English manor-house in a neo-Gothic style: despite so many interesting features which still survive, who knows anything about it, I wonder, and who even remembers it? The Touring Club Guide does not mention it, and this lets any passing tourists off the hook. But even in Ferrara itself, the few Jews left that make up the dwindling Jewish community have the air of having forgotten it.

Although the early twentieth-century Touring Club Guides never failed to recognize it, in a curious tone poised between the lyrical and the worldly, the current edition does not mention it, and this is certainly unfortunate. Still, to be fair: the garden or, to be more precise, the vast parkland, which before the war encircled the Finzi-Contini house and stretched for almost ten hectares up to the Mura degli Angeli on one side and the Barriera di Porta San Benedetto on the other, and representing in itself something rare and exceptional, no longer exists, literally speaking. All the broad-canopied trees, limes, elms, beeches, poplars, plane trees, horse chestnuts, pines, firs, larches, cedars of Lebanon, cypresses, oaks, holm oaks, and even the palm trees and eucalyptuses, planted in their hundreds by Josette Artom during the last two years of the First World War, were cut down for firewood, and for some time the land had returned to the state it was in when Moisè Finzi-Contini acquired it from the Marchesi of Avogli: one of the many great gardens ringed within the city walls.

Which leaves the house itself. Except that the huge, singular edifice, badly damaged by a bombardment in 1944, is still today occupied by fifty or so families of evacuees, belonging to the city’s wretched sub-proletariat, not unlike the plebs of the Roman slums, who continue to cluster especially in the entrance of the Palazzone of Via Mortara: an embittered, wild, aggrieved tribe (some months back, I heard, they received with a hail of stones the Council’s Inspector of Hygiene, who had come on his bicycle to survey the place). And so as to discourage any future eviction on the part of the Overseers of the Local Monuments of Emilia and Romagna, it seems they had the bright idea of scraping the last remnants of antique murals from the walls.

So why, now, send unsuspecting tourists into such a trap? – I figure the compilers of the last Touring Club Guide must have asked themselves. And in the end what exactly would there be left to see?

Giorgio Bassani

THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS

Translated by JAMIE MCKENDRICK

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

THE BEGINNING

PENGUIN CLASSICS

THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS

Introduction

Translator’s Note

Prologue

I

1