Literature and the Arts

Abstract

There has been a great flowering of the arts since the end of Fascism and the war in Italy, particularly in literature, the cinema and the theatre. Alberto Moravia emerged quickly as one of the leading novelists with La Romana in 1947 and Il Conformista in 1951. Already in 1945 Carlo Levi, a painter by profession, published a remarkable description of his banishment to Lucania under Mussolini. The book was called Cristo si é fermato a Eboli, and it helped to focus attention on the problem of the south. Later, in 1959, Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo focused attention on Sicily.