Book 4: Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, 1962)

This short, haunting novel by Giorgio Bassani takes place just before World War II in Ferrara, Italy, a northern city noted for its Renaissance palaces. The narrator, Giorgio, is a middle-class Jew who befriends the aristocratic Finzi-Contini children, Alberto and Micol, also Jewish, who live in a splendid walled estate with an enormous garden — a garden so old that one of the plane trees is said to have been planted 500 years ago by Lucrezia Borgia.

After Italy adopts the Manifesto della razza (the race code) in 1938, Jews are stripped of their Italian citizenship and are banned from many jobs and facets of public life. They can't marry gentiles. They can't employ them as servants — "real" Italians having been declared members of the Aryan race and thus superior. Jews can't use the public library or even the town's athletic club.

In response, the Finzi-Continis open up their fabled garden as a place for young people to gather and play tennis. Here they lounge about in chic white tennis outfits — captured so elegantly in the film (at right) — and sip Skiwasser* and talk about their studies. Micol, charmingly, is writing a thesis on Emily Dickinson. The young men smoke pipes (the reason I chose the above photo of Bassani, who himself grew up Jewish in Ferrara and met his wife playing tennis).

Here in the garden Giorgio and Micol scamper away from the group with the Great Dane Jor. Micol loves the huge garden with all its dappled sunlight and ancient trees. When Giorgio can't identify a single tree she looks at him like he's a "monster." "How can you possibly be so ignorant?" The moment reveals not only the sauciness that endears her to Giorgio, but also the hallmark of the Finzi-Continis: Wealth is not wasted on them. Their treasures — their house, their library, their recordings of American jazz, their acreage — are not empty status symbols, but are known and loved and appreciated. Even the old carriage, long supplanted by an automobile, is trotted out regularly for spins up and down the driveway. Why should beautiful things languish and die?

In the garden, Giorgio falls deeply in love with Micol, who, deeming him more like a brother — Oh dreaded fate! — rejects his advances. He spends the rest of the novel desperately pining for her, and the heartbreak unravels him, just as Europe is disintegrating into World War II.

In the prologue of the book (prologues are ubiquitous in Italian literature, I'm finding), we are briefly told that Micol and her family were deported to Germany and died there in concentration camps. In the epilogue, we are brought full circle and reminded of this fate. By then Micol is not just Micol, a pretty girl loved madly by a boy. Rather, she is the very luster of European civilization laid to waste by brutish, glowering ignorance.

The power of this ending is enhanced by an almost complete lack of detail — a necessary omission because our narrator Giorgio, like so many Jewish survivors, simply doesn't know what happened to his friends. ("all deported to Germany in '43, who could say if they found any sort of burial at all?") He knows nothing of the horrors that met them at the concentration camp, the horrors so readily depicted in more recent Holocaust narratives. He just knows that they vanished. And never returned.

Director Vittorio de Sica's treatment of this ending is possibly the most moving thing I have ever seen in a film. Like the book, he doesn't rely on any grim Holocaust imagery, even though he could, not being constrained by a first-person narrator. Instead, he shows the gorgeous Renaissance palaces of Ferrara and then — stunningly — the young people playing tennis in the sunny garden of the Finzi-Continis, not a care in the world, with the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning, being sung in the background. The credits roll on an empty tennis court in an empty garden.

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Some odds and ends:

Giorgio Bassani, interestingly, was responsible for the publication of "The Leopard," the first book I discussed, after it was rejected by several publishers. How fitting for him to have recognized its worth.

The actress who plays Micol in the Vittorio de Sica film — Dominique Sanda (shown above with the bicycle) — is the dancing lesbian in Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Conformist"! And she's actually French, not Italian.

The character Alberto Finzi-Contini, Micol's brother, seems gay in the book and in the movie, but nothing is ever directly said about it, except that he takes no interest in brothels and seems to prefer the company of young men and likes "modern" furniture. The book has an unrelated passage about homosexuality that shows the narrator Girogio's progressive sympathies: "Malnate, on this subject, had very simple ideas: like a true goy — I thought to myself. For him, homosexuals were only 'poor bastards,' 'obsessed' creatures, not worth considering ... I, on the contrary, sustained that love justifies and sanctifies everything, even homosexuality." This seems ahead of its time, but the dots are never connected. I read, though, that Bassani wrote an earlier novel, in the 1950s, "exploring the marginalization of Jews and homosexuals."

*Skiwasser is an Austrian drink of equal parts water and raspberry syrup with a slice of lemon added and a few grapes. It's consumed hot. In summer, cold, without the lemon, it's called Himbeerwasser.

Ferrara is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site for its Renaissance architecture. Here's the Corso Ercole I d'Este, the street in the town center on which the fictional Finzi-Continis live.