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La Dolce Lettura: A Taste of Italian Literature📜📚

17 items

Mariachiara

As an Italian I couldn't resist, so I prepared for you this literary journey through Italy with this handpicked list of 14 remarkable books—ranging from medieval epics and Renaissance drama to modern novels, feminist voices, immigrant stories, and po...

Sections

🏛️ Foundational & Political Classics

🧠 Modernism & Identity (Early 20th Century)

🌍 Post-War Italy & Memory

🕵️‍♂️ Mystery, History & Power

🌇 Postmodern & Imaginative Fiction

👩‍👧 Contemporary Voices & Social Realism

🏛️ Foundational & Political Classics

Bold ideas that shaped Italian identity and philosophy. These early works laid the groundwork for modern Italian literature and politics. They explore the role of the individual in society and the birth of national consciousness.

This isn’t just about ruthless politics, it’s about seeing the world as it really is, not how we want it to be. Machiavelli shocked me with how current it all feels, even though it was written in the 1500s. It’s cynical, yes, but it’s also oddly clea...

The Prince|Paperback

Jacopo’s letters feel like reading the soul of someone who’s completely lost hope, not just in love, but in his country, in the world. The romanticism here isn’t just emotional, it’s political. I felt like I was watching a man come apart in real time...

The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis|Paperback

🧠 Modernism & Identity (Early 20th Century)

Experimental fiction diving into psychology, identity, and the absurd. These novels broke away from traditional storytelling, probing the unconscious mind and questioning the nature of reality and the self.

Zeno is such a disaster of a person, and that’s why I liked him. He lies to himself constantly, blames everyone else, and overanalyzes everything… but who doesn’t, honestly? There’s something brutally relatable in how he narrates his failures. It’s a...

Confessions of Zeno: The cult classic discovered and championed by James Joyce|Paperback

The idea of just vanishing and starting over has a strange appeal, and this book takes that fantasy and totally deconstructs it. Mattia escapes one identity only to end up trapped in another. It’s funny, sad, and oddly philosophical. Pirandello is br...

The Late Mattia Pascal|Paperback

This play completely turned my brain inside out. It’s not just characters talking, it’s characters questioning their own existence. The whole thing is unsettling in the best way. It made me wonder if we’re all just following some invisible script. Ev...

Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays|Paperback

This book completely scrambled how I think about identity. At first, it seems like a small thing, the narrator notices his nose looks different than he thought, but from that moment, everything unravels. This isn’t a book you read for plot, it’s on...

One, None and a Hundred Thousand

🌍 Post-War Italy & Memory

Personal and collective memory in the shadow of war. These deeply reflective works document the trauma of WWII and the way memory, family, and language shape identity in a country rebuilding itself.

This book has a haunting kind of quiet. It’s about returning home after the war and realizing everything’s changed, maybe you’ve changed too. There’s a sadness that runs through every page, but it’s never dramatic. Pavese writes memory like it’s some...

The Moon and the Bonfires|Paperback

This was like sitting at someone’s kitchen table and listening to them tell stories about their family, funny, annoying, tragic, loving, all through the language they shared. I loved how Ginzburg uses words, phrases, and inside jokes as the glue hold...

Family Lexicon|Paperback

I don’t think I’ve read anything as emotionally restrained yet as devastating as this. Levi tells the truth without embellishment, which somehow makes it hit even harder. He’s not trying to make you cry, he’s just telling you exactly what happened, a...

If This Is a Man / The Truce (Everyman's Library)

🕵️‍♂️ Mystery, History & Power

Layered stories of crime, politics, and hidden truths. These novels use mystery and historical settings to explore power, corruption, and the complexity of Italian society.

This book was a ride. On the surface, it’s a medieval murder mystery, but underneath, it’s a dense web of philosophy, theology, and semiotics. I won’t lie, it’s a challenging read. But once I found the rhythm, I was completely absorbed. Eco builds a ...

The Name of the Rose|Paperback

This was absolute chaos, and I kind of loved it. The language is dense, the plot is tangled, and the ending is unsatisfying on purpose. But it mirrors Italy itself: messy, political, contradictory. Gadda isn’t trying to solve a crime; he’s using the ...

That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana|Paperback

There’s this cold, quiet intensity to Moravia’s writing that unsettled me more than I expected. The main character is so desperate to be “normal” that he becomes terrifying. It's a chilling portrait of how fascism creeps in, not just through politics...

The Conformist|Paperback

🌇 Postmodern & Imaginative Fiction

Inventive narratives that blend reality, history, and imagination. Playful yet profound, these novels challenge conventional form, reimagining how stories are told and what they mean.

I read this slowly, almost like poetry. Every “city” is a metaphor,some are beautiful, some are unsettling, but all of them make you think. The conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan feel philosophical without being pretentious. I kept unde...

Invisible Cities|Paperback

This book felt like watching the sunset on an entire way of life. The writing is gorgeous, so atmospheric and reflective. The story is slow, but deliberately so. It’s about decline, transformation, and the illusion of change. There’s so much wisdom i...

The Leopard: A Novel|Paperback

👩‍👧 Contemporary Voices & Social Realism

Explorations of gender, class, and coming-of-age in modern Italy. Focusing on marginalized voices and everyday struggles, these works are rooted in realism and empathy, offering new perspectives on Italian life.

This one caught me off guard with how powerful it was. It’s historical fiction, but it felt so immediate. The Duchess can’t speak, but she sees everything, and her silence becomes a form of resistance. It’s about gender, control, and carving out spac...

The Silent Duchess|Paperback

I didn’t think a friendship could be this intense to read about. Elena and Lila’s relationship is complicated, messy, loyal, toxic, everything all at once. Ferrante captures the way people grow apart and together with painful accuracy. It’s also a po...

My Brilliant Friend (The Neapolitan Novels #1)|Paperback

At first, it feels like a nostalgic summer story, but then the tension creeps in, and it becomes something darker. Seeing the world through a child’s eyes makes it more disturbing, not less. The innocence, the betrayal, the fear, it all unfolds slowl...

I'm Not Scared|Paperback