The Novel of Ferrara

Giorgio Bassani

Set on a winter Sunday in 1947, this taut, poignant novel follows a middle-aged man who sets out to spend the day hunting—only to find that the quiet rituals of the outdoors cannot quiet the unease gathering inside him. As the hours pass, his journey becomes less about the hunt than about memory, regret, and the slow confrontation with the life he has lived and the choices that have shaped him. Woven through the narrative is Bassani’s signature, finely observed melancholy: a reckoning with identity and time, and a deeply felt, tormented relationship with Ferrara. In the culmination of his Ferrara sequence, the story turns inward with restraint and emotional force, offering a meditation on mortality, self-knowledge, and the cost of looking back.