Biography

Wrote a story for Michelangelo Antonioni titled 'Tecnicamente dolce' in 1970. The movie was never made.

Famous Italian novelist.

Member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from 1945 to 1957.

Friend of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Cesare Pavese and Elio Vittorini.

President of the jury at the Venice Film Festival in 1981.

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different - not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them - following the true bent of the written language.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

The inferno of the living is not something that will be. If there is one, it is what is already there, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

I change my method and field of reference from book to book because I can never believe in the same thing two times running.