The Garden of the Finzi-Continis: Introduction by Tim Parks-Fast Shipping

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Giorgio Bassani’s acclaimed novel of unrequited loveand the plight of the Italian Jews on the brink of World War II has become a classicof modern Italian literature.

Made into an Academy Award—winning film in 1970, TheGarden of the Finzi—Continis is a richly evocative and nostalgic depiction of prewarItaly. The narrator, a young middle-class Jew in the Italian city of Ferrara, haslong been fascinated from afar by the Finzi-Continis, a wealthy and aristocraticJewish family, and especially by their daughter Micol. But it is not until 1938 thathe is invited behind the walls of their lavish estate, as local Jews begin to gatherthere to avoid the racial laws of the Fascists, and the garden of the Finzi-Continisbecomes an idyllic sanctuary in an increasingly brutal world. Years after the war,the narrator returns in memory to his doomed relationship with the lovely Micol,and to the predicament that faced all the Ferrarese Jews, in this unforgettably wrenchingportrait of a community about to be destroyed by the world outside the garden walls.