Natalia Ginzburg (1916–1991)

Natalia Ginzburg, née Levi, was born in Palermo, Sicily, to a family of scholars and intellectuals. Her father was pioneering biologist and professor Giuseppe Levi. She published her first novella at age 17, and in her 20s, she was the first person to translate Proust's novel Du côté de chez Swann (Swann's Way) into Italian. In 1938, she married Leone Ginzburg, an editor and political activist, with whom she had three children. As Jews and anti-fascists, they were punished by Mussolini's government with internal exile in a remote area of Abruzzi. After the Allied invasion, they went to Rome to continue working for the Italian resistance, but Leone was captured, tortured, and executed by the Nazis in 1944. Natalia's first novel La strada che va in città (The Road to the City) was published in 1942 under a pseudonym, but subsequently she used the name Natalia Ginzburg (sometimes misspelled Ginzberg). Moving back to Rome at the end of the war, she worked as an editor for the publisher Einaudi for many years while writing her novels, plays, essays, and short stories, including Tutti I nostri ieri (1952), Valentino (1957), Piccole virtù (1962), Caro Michele (1973), and La Famiglia Manzoni (1983). In 1950, she remarried to Gabriele Baldini, a professor of English literature at the University of  Trieste, with whom she had two more children. She won the Strega Prize in 1963 for Lessico Famigliare (Family Sayings), a semi-autobiographical work about her family’s anti-fascist life. Always politically involved, Natalia was elected to the Italian Parliament as an independent left-wing deputy in 1983 and again in 1987.