The haunting, classic novel of Fascist Italy on the brink of World War II, made into an Academy Award-winning film

The Finzi-Continis are an aristocratic Jewish family who live an insular life behind the walls of their estate in the northern Italian city of Ferrera. The narrator, a young middle-class Jew, has been intrigued by the Finzi-Continis from boyhood and especially by the two children, Alberto and Micol. Not until he is twenty-two, in the autumn of 1938, is he invited to enter their private world, a place seemingly immune from the racial laws of Fascist Italy. Thirteen years after the war, he traces his intricate relationship with the beautiful Micol and shares the predicament of all the Ferrarese Jews on the eve of their destruction. Critically acclaimed and award-winning, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is an unforgettable, wrenching novel that re-creates a tragic era in history.

Giorgio Bassani (1916-2000), among Italy's most important twentieth-century novelists and poets, grew up in Ferrara under fascism, the son of upper-middle-class Jewish parents. He participated in the anti-fascist resistance, then lived and worked for most of his life in Rome. Alongside his many literary activities, he was a founder and president of Italia Nostra, the environmental and cultural association.