Open City: Seven Writers in Postwar Rome

by William Weaver (Editor), Ignazio Silone, Giorgio Bassani

A magic decade of Italian writing followed the fall of Mussolini's Fascists and the liberation of Rome in 1944. Ignazio Silone, author of one of the great novels of the 1930s, Bread and Wine, returned from exile. Alberto Moravia, who helped define the modern conscience with his novel, The Time of Indifference, left the mountains outside Rome where he had been hiding from the Germans. Rome filled with veterans of the partisan war, of the underground, of the anonymity and silence of the Italian police state. The suffering of the war, the bold hopes which blossomed after Fascism's overthrow, were described in a torrent of films, stories and novels, bringing a kind of climax to one of the great national literatures of the twentieth century. American William Weaver also arrived in Rome in the late 1940s. Open City is an anthology of the writers Weaver admired most, and they all come to life in the pages of his long introductory memoir.

Genres: Italy, Nonfiction, Italian Literature, History

490 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1999

About the author

William Fense Weaver is perhaps best known for his translations of the work of Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino, and has translated many other Italian writers over the course of a career spanning more than fifty years. In addition to prose, he has translated Italian poetry and opera libretti, and has worked as a critic and commentator on the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts.

Born in the U.S. state of Virginia and educated at Princeton University B.A. summa cum laude in 1946, with postgraduate study at the University of Rome in 1949.[2] Weaver was an ambulance driver in Italy during World War II for the American Field Service, and lived primarily in Italy after the end of the war. Through his friendships with Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia and others, Weaver met many of Italy's leading authors and intellectuals in Rome in the late 1940s and early 1950s; he paid tribute to them in his anthology Open City (1999).

Most recently, Weaver was a professor of literature at Bard College in New York, and a Bard Center Fellow. He received honorary degrees from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom and Trinity College in Connecticut. According to translator Geoffrey Brock, Weaver was too ill to translate Umberto Eco's 2005 novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana 2004).

Reviews

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the sections in here were excellent, others less so. I loved "The Nameless One," and I wished that every other excerpt could have lived up to its majesty. My other favorite was "Valentino." "Agostino" had its moments, but it kind of petered out at the end without much resolution. "The Watch" and "Bread and Wine" both seem like they require the scope of their greater works to do them justice. And "That Awful Mess on Via Merulana" just dragged. (I read the entirety of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis very recently, so I skipped the excerpt of it in this book.) I'll certainly be checking out some of the longer works by these authors, beginning, of course, with the full House of Liars.

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're looking for an introduction to literature from post-war Rome, then look no further than this publication.

[Maria Rihte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent collection of stories!!!!

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very important and well-chosen anthology of post-WWII Italian literature, when Rome was really the center of the cultural experience of Italy. William Weaver settled there after having been a soldier in the Allied Army.