The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

…Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1962; The Garden of the Finzi-Continis; film 1971). The narrator of this work contrasts his own middle-class Jewish family with the aristocratic, decadent Finzi-Continis, also Jewish, whose sheltered lives end in annihilation by the Nazis.

…adaptation of Giorgio Bassani’s classicnovel about the destruction of the Jews in the city of Ferrara during the Holocaust. Una breve vacanza (1973; A Brief Vacation), the simple tale of a hospital volunteer worker, was in the style of De Sica’s Neorealist films. De Sica’s last film, Il viaggio…

…(Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini [1962; The Garden of the Finzi-Continis]). Italo Calvino concentrated on fantastic tales (Il visconte dimezzato [1952; The Cloven Viscount], Il barone rampante [1957; The Baron in the Trees], and Il cavaliere inesistente [1959; The Nonexistent Knight]) and, later, on moralizing science fiction (Le cosmicomiche