Many of the people who populated Giorgio Bassani’s novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis also appear on the pages of the novella The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles (original title: Gli occhiali d’oro).

The two books are close siblings, perhaps even Siamese twins, as the stories are intertwined in many complex ways, both in terms of characters and recurring themes.

The wearer of the gold-rimmed spectacles is the Venetian doctor Athos Fadigati, lover of Wagner’s music and modern art, but also of young men.

For a while, he manages to balance his homosexual desires with his need for bourgeois respectability, but inevitably, he falls into disgrace.

Bassani uses stylistic detail in a way that is reminiscent of Thomas Mann’s early novellas, as a way to both reveal and conceal character (which the spectacles of the title is perhaps the best example of).

The book about doctor Fadigati and his unrequited love was Bassani’s first novel, and thus also the first to invite readers to the literary version of his hometown Ferrara.

Throughout his books, the town is used as a lens through which he explores the mechanism and psyche of Italian culture, elaborates on the relationship between individual and the collective, and on matters of minority versus majority.

Even though the narrative is far from painless, the language is light, like a summer’s day, and the contrast between the prose and the content is what has made the story so popular.

Soon after its publication, it became a modern classic, not only for its beautiful language but also for its ability to bring back to life forgotten places, and for the portrayal of people who no longer exist.