Giorgio Bassani has been called “the witness of the 20th century”.

Born in 1916, in the renaissance town Ferrara, Emilia-Romagna, he grew up in a beautiful and seemingly idyllic place. In a series of books, he recreated the Ferrara of his youth, describing a town of great beauty, expertly detailing the everyday practices of this small Italian community.

The reason that Bassani has been named a “witness” is because he, through his novels, testified about a time that no longer existed.

The two decades in-between the world wars were (for him, at least) a time marked both by the lightness of youth and the approaching catastrophe. His literary world is defined by this retrospective view, of gazing back through time, but is at the same time free from nostalgia.

Bassani was writing from a place in time where he knew the end of the story – he had witnessed the rise of National Socialism in Germany and the popularity of fascism in Italy, and had also lived through the fall of both.

This darkness is obviously present in his books, but so is an appreciation of life. In his world, hope and despair exist side by side, both part of human experience.

 The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (original title: Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini) takes its starting point in 1957, twelve years after the end of the second world war, when the unnamed narrator, on his way home, stops at an Etruscan necropolis near Rome.

A young girl asks her father why these old tombs don’t seem as melancholic as more recent ones. The father replies that it is because the Etruscans died so long ago, almost as though, “they had never lived, as if they had always been dead”.

In contrast, new tombstones still carry reflections of the life recently lost. The girl points out that by virtue of their conversation, the dead had been brought back to life, if only for a few moments.

The brief encounter with the young girl triggers a memory, and the story dwindles back through time, to the late 1920s, when the Finzi-Contini lived in self-imposed exile in their large mansion in Ferrara, secure behind high walls and locked gates.

The novel’s title refers to the Finzi-Continis’ vast, beautiful garden, and quickly became one of the most famous literary gardens of the world, a verdant symbol of enormous privileges and wealth, but also of both voluntary and forced seclusion.

The book outlines the societal changes occurring at this time, and describes how already by 1938, the character of the garden has shifted from being symbol of the social elevation of a select few to functioning as a sanctuary for local Jews, who began to gather here to avoid the newly introduced racial laws of the Fascists.

While this is happening, friendships develop and romantic feelings grow within the group.