Bassani was born in
Bologna into a prosperous
Jewish family of
Ferrara, where he spent his childhood with his mother Dora, father Enrico (a doctor), brother Paolo, and sister Jenny. In 1934, he completed his studies at his secondary school, the
liceo classico L. Ariosto in Ferrara. The high school's historical archive contains many documents and photos concerning his young life, which are displayed in the atrium that they dedicated to him. Music had been his first great passion, and he considered a career as a pianist; however, literature soon became the focus of his artistic interests. In 1935, he enrolled in the Faculty of Letters of the
University of Bologna. Commuting to lectures by train (third class) from Ferrara, he studied under the
art historian Roberto Longhi. His ideal of the "free intellectual" was the liberal historian and philosopher
Benedetto Croce. Despite the
anti-Semitic race laws which were introduced in 1938, he was able to graduate in 1939, writing a thesis on the nineteenth-century writer, journalist, radical and lexicographer
Niccolò Tommaseo. As a Jew in 1939, however, work opportunities were now limited, and he became a schoolteacher in the Jewish School of Ferrara in via Vignatagliata. In 1953,
La passeggiata prima di cena appeared and in 1954,
Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti. In the same year, he became editor of
Paragone, a journal founded by Longhi and his wife,
Anna Banti. Bassani's writings reached a wider audience in 1956 with the publication of the
Premio Strega-winning book of short stories,
Cinque storie ferraresi (the five stories are
Lida Mantovani,
La passeggiata prima di cena,
Una lapide in via Mazzini,
Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti, and ''Una notte del '43''). As an editorial director of
Feltrinelli, Bassani was responsible for the posthumous publication in 1958 of
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's
Il Gattopardo, a novel which had been rejected by
Elio Vittorini at
Mondadori, and
Einaudi. It became one of the great successes of post-war Italian literature. Bassani's enthusiastic editing of the text, following instructions from (daughter of
Benedetto), who had offered him the manuscript, later became controversial; however, recent editions have been published which follow the manuscript more closely. Also in 1958, Bassani's novel ''Gli occhiali d'oro
(made into a film in 1987) was published, an examination, in part, of the marginalisation of Jews and homosexuals. Together with stories from Cinque storie ferraresi
(reworked and under the new title Dentro le mura
(1973)), it was to form part of a series of works known collectively as Il romanzo di Ferrara,
which explored the city, with its Christian and Jewish elements, its perspectives and its landscapes. The series includes: Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, 1962, Premio Viareggio prizewinner); Dietro la porta
(1964); L'airone
(1968) and L'odore del fieno
(1972). These works realistically document the Italian Jewish community under Fascism in a style that manifests the difficulties of searching for truth in the meanderings of memory and moral conscience. In 1960, one of his short stories (Una notte del '43
, from Cinque storie ferraresi
) was adapted as the film Long Night in 1943. A stage adaptation of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis'' by opera composer
Ricky Ian Gordon is set to premiere in January 2022. It is a co-production of
National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene and the
New York City Opera. From 1965 to 1980, Giorgio Bassani was the president of the organization
Italia Nostra. Bassani died in 2000 and was buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Ferrara, the same place where he located the graves of the family Finzi-Contini. He was survived by his estranged wife, Valeria and their two children, Paola (born 1 September 1945) and Enrico (born 29 June 1949). He had been with his companion, Portia Prebys, since shortly after they met in 1977. The city of Ferrara decided to commemorate his life by giving his name to the Communal Library and the Urban Park in the Northern part of the city. Bassani received the , the
Strega, the
Campiello, the
Viareggio and the
Nelly Sachs prizes. He collaborated on several screenplays. == Awards ==