Italian writer, fatally born in Cuba, in 1923, because his parents lived there for a while, the cause was work. Perhaps the most famous Italian writer internationally from 1945 until his death, that is, until 1985. It began to be published immediately after the end of the Second World War, becoming one of the most important writers within the current that has been called neorealism. One of those early times is the novel that is mentioned so many times in the article, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, published in 1947. After fighting the partisans during the war, he joined the CPI in 1945. From 1960 his literature evolved considerably, moving towards a mold that sought to explore both the power of narration and intertextuality. He is an indispensable writer for those who are interested in the literature of the last half century in Italy, and also quite interesting for those who want to study the directions of Western literature. The agent of the literary trajectory that is at the origin of this article. Without her knowing, of course.

He left the Communist Party at the time of the Hungarian invasion (1956). Remembering those moments, in 1980 he wrote the following words:

"We Italian communists were schizophrenic. Yeah, I think that's the exact term. With a part of ourselves as witnesses of the truth, we were, we wanted to be, avengers of all the insults to the weak and the crushed, defenders of justice against all abuse. With another part of us, however, we justified the insults, the excesses, the tyranny of the party, Stalin in the name of the Cause. The schizophrenics. The dissociated ones. I remember very well that when I was travelling through a socialist country, I felt completely uncomfortable, foreign, hostile. But when the train brought me back to Italy, when I crossed the border, I wondered: but here in Italy, in this Italy, what can one be, if not communist? Here’s why the East-West meltdown, the end of Stalinism, took away a heavy burden from our chest: our moral image, our dissociated identity, because it could be formed again, because revolution and truth coincided again. This was the dream and hope of many of us in those days."

These words have a special meaning here and now.