Books set in Italy

About the literature of Italy

Italy's literature is rooted in Dante's Divine Comedy, the fourteenth-century poem that helped establish Tuscan as the literary language of Italy. Boccaccio's Decameron dates from the same century. Six Italian writers have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, most recently the playwright Dario Fo in 1997. Modern fiction often returns to unification, Fascism and the divide between north and south.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard follows a Sicilian aristocratic family through Italian unification in the 1860s. Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped at Eboli recounts his political exile among the peasants of Basilicata in the 1930s. Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend traces two girls growing up in a poor, violent Naples neighbourhood in the 1950s. Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose is a murder mystery in a fourteenth-century Benedictine abbey.