The Novel of Ferrara by Giorgio Bassani

Author:Giorgio Bassani [Bassani, Giorgio]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Literary, Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780141939070
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2018-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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PROFESSOR ERMANNO was not exaggerating. Among the almost twenty thousand books in the house, many of them on scientific, historical or a variety of scholarly topics (the latter mainly in German), there were many hundreds devoted to the literature of the New Italy. As for whatever had been published relating to Carducci’s fin-de-siècle literary circle, from the decades in which he had taught in Bologna, there was practically nothing missing. There were volumes in verse and in prose not only by the Maestro himself, but also by Panzacchi, Severino Ferrari, Lorenzo Stecchetti, Ugo Brilli, Guido Mazzoni, by the young Pascoli, the young Panzini, the very young Valgimigli—generally first editions, nearly all of them bearing signed dedications to the Baroness Josette Artom di Susegana. Gathered in three separate glass bookcases which occupied a whole wall of a huge first-floor reception room next to Professor Ermanno’s personal study, there was no doubt that these books together represented a collection of which any public library, including Bologna’s Archiginnasio’s, would be glad to boast. The collection even housed the little volumes, rare as hen’s teeth, of the prose poems of Francesco Acri, the famous translator of Plato, till then only known to me as a translator: not such “a saint,” then, as Professor Meldolesi (who had also been a scholar of Acri’s work) had, since the fifth form, insisted to us he was, as his dedications to Alberto and Micòl’s grandmother were, out of the whole chorus of them, perhaps the most gallant and showed the most heightened masculine awareness of the proud beauty to which they alluded.

With an entire, specialized library at my disposal, and besides that, being oddly keen to be there every morning, in the great, warm, silent hall which received light from three big, high windows adorned with pelmets covered in red-striped white silk, and at the center of which, under a taupe cover, stretched the billiards table, I managed to complete my thesis on Panzacchi in the two-and-a-half months which followed. If I’d really wanted to, who knows, I might have been able to finish it earlier. But was that really what I wanted? Or rather hadn’t I tried to eke out the time for as long as possible so as to have the right to visit the Finzi-Contini house in the mornings as well? What is certain is that around the middle of March (news having in the meantime been received of Micòl’s graduation, with the marks of 110 out of 110), I still remained torpidly attached to the meagre privilege of these additional morning visits to the house from which she insisted on keeping such a distance. By this time only a few days separated us from the Catholic Easter, which fell that year almost at the same time as Pesach, the Jewish Easter. Although spring was almost at our doors, a week earlier it had snowed with extraordinary abundance, after which the cold had returned with a vengeance. It almost seemed as though the winter had no intention of ever ending.

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