Italy Secondaria di secondo grado – classe 5ª (esame di Stato) Italian language and literature

1. Literature from Unity to today

Leopardi · Poetry from Baudelaire to Symbolism · The novel: realism and its crisis · 20th-century poetry · Narrative from Neorealism to today · Essay, journalism and memoir

• Giacomo Leopardi – Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) was an Italian poet and thinker from Recanati. His short poems (the Canti), his prose dialogues (Operette morali) and his huge notebook (Zibaldone) ask why people long for happiness that nature never gives. He moves from a gentle "nature is a mother" view to a hard "nature is indifferent" view, yet ends with a call for human solidarity in La ginestra. In Europe he stands beside the Romantics, but he keeps classical forms and doubts the idea of progress.
• The Novel: Realism and Its Crisis (Verga, Pirandello, Svevo) – Verismo is the Italian form of realism in the late 1800s. Giovanni Verga writes about poor people from the outside, with an "impersonal" narrator who gives no opinion. Luigi Pirandello then shows that a person has many masks and no single fixed "me". Italo Svevo, in La coscienza di Zeno, tells the story through an unreliable narrator whose mind is a tangle. Together they show the novel moving from "looking at the world" to "doubting who looks".
• Narrative from Neorealism to Today (Gadda, Fenoglio, Calvino, Levi) – After 1945 Italian writers turned to ordinary people and the war just ended: this is Neorealism, with plain, true voices. Soon each writer found a personal way. Fenoglio wrote the partisan war in the hills as a hard human story. Gadda tangled many voices and dialects to show a messy world. Calvino used fables and games with story pieces. Primo Levi gave a clear, calm witness of his experience in simple words. Pavese, Pasolini and Morante are optional extra voices.