Natalia Ginzburg

Based on Wikipedia: Natalia Ginzburg

The Writer Who Lost Everything and Found Her Voice

In 1944, in a Roman prison, Leone Ginzburg died after being tortured by the Fascists. His crime was editing an underground anti-Fascist newspaper. His wife Natalia, who had helped him run that paper, was twenty-seven years old with three small children. She would go on to become one of Italy's most celebrated writers of the twentieth century.

But here's what's remarkable: the trauma didn't make her bitter or polemical. Instead, Natalia Ginzburg developed a literary voice of extraordinary intimacy and quietness. She wrote about family dinners, apartment living rooms, the small accumulated phrases that families repeat to each other over decades. She wrote, in other words, about ordinary domestic life—but in a way that made readers feel the weight of history pressing against those kitchen walls.

A Secular Childhood in a House Full of Ideas

Natalia was born in 1916 in Palermo, Sicily, but her family moved north to Turin when she was three. Her father, Giuseppe Levi, was a renowned histologist—a scientist who studies the microscopic structure of tissues—at the University of Turin. Her mother, Lidia Tanzi, came from a Catholic family, while her father was Jewish. Neither parent was religious. They raised Natalia and her four siblings as atheists.

The Levi household was a salon of sorts. Intellectuals, political activists, and industrialists passed through constantly. One of Natalia's sisters, Paola, would later marry Adriano Olivetti, whose family built the famous typewriter company. The children grew up surrounded by conversation, argument, and ideas.

At seventeen, Natalia published her first short story in a literary magazine called Solaria. The year was 1933. Benito Mussolini had been in power for over a decade, and the Fascist grip on Italian society was tightening. The story was called "I bambini"—"The Children."

Love and Resistance

Five years later, Natalia married Leone Ginzburg, a fellow anti-Fascist intellectual. Leone was a literary scholar and translator—he introduced Russian literature to Italian readers—and he was also deeply involved in the resistance against Mussolini's regime.

For a few years, the couple managed to live relatively normally, even as the world collapsed around them. They had three children: Carlo, Andrea, and Alessandra. Their son Carlo would grow up to become a distinguished historian.

But in 1941, the Fascist government had had enough of Leone's activities. He was sent into internal exile—a common punishment in Fascist Italy, where dissidents were banished to remote villages and forced to remain there under surveillance. Leone was assigned to Pizzoli, a small village in Abruzzo, the mountainous region east of Rome. Natalia and the children went with him.

Internal exile was isolating but not violent. The real danger came later. After Italy's government collapsed in 1943, the Germans occupied much of the country. Leone and Natalia secretly moved to Rome, where they resumed their underground work, editing an anti-Fascist newspaper.

Then Leone was caught.

The Nazis and their Italian collaborators arrested him in late 1943. He was imprisoned in Rome's Regina Coeli jail. He died there in February 1944, having been tortured so severely that his body gave out. Natalia was a widow at twenty-seven.

Finding a Literary Home at Einaudi

After the war, Natalia threw herself into work. She joined the editorial staff of Einaudi, one of Italy's most prestigious publishing houses, based in Turin. The company had been founded in 1933 by Giulio Einaudi, a friend of Leone's from their anti-Fascist days.

Working at Einaudi in the late 1940s meant being at the center of Italian literary life. The house published Primo Levi, the chemist who survived Auschwitz and wrote about it with devastating precision. They published Carlo Levi (no relation to Natalia's birth family), whose memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli described his own experience of internal exile in the impoverished south. They published Cesare Pavese, the poet and novelist who would become one of Italy's most influential postwar voices. And they published Italo Calvino, who would eventually become famous worldwide for playful, philosophical novels like Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler.

Natalia was not just an editor. She was writing too. Her first novel had actually been published in 1942, during the war, but under a pseudonym: Alessandra Tornimparte. The year 1942 was the height of Fascist Italy's anti-Semitic period—Jews were banned from publishing under their own names. Even though Natalia had been raised secular and didn't identify strongly as Jewish, the Fascist racial laws applied to her anyway.

That first novel was called La strada che va in città—The Road to the City. After the war, she published under her married name, Natalia Ginzburg, which she kept even after she remarried.

The Question of Faith

The war and the Holocaust forced Natalia to think hard about what it meant to be Jewish. She had grown up without religion, but the Fascists and Nazis had defined her as a Jew anyway. Her husband had been killed by people who saw all Jews as enemies.

What she concluded surprised and troubled many of her friends. Natalia became sympathetic to Catholicism—not as a convert, exactly, but as someone who saw Christ as a persecuted Jew, someone who identified with suffering and resistance. She publicly opposed removing crucifixes from Italian public buildings, which put her at odds with secular intellectuals.

Whether she actually converted to Catholicism is disputed. Some sources say she did; others describe her as remaining an "atheist Jewess" who simply found meaning in Catholic symbolism and tradition. What's clear is that her thinking was shaped by the war in ways that defied easy categories. She had seen where pure secularism and pure nationalism could lead. She was groping toward something else.

A Second Marriage and a Prolific Decade

In 1950, Natalia married again. Her new husband was Gabriele Baldini, a scholar of English literature. They moved to Rome, where they became central figures in the city's cultural scene.

The next twenty years were Natalia's most productive. She published novel after novel, along with essays and plays. Her most celebrated work, Lessico famigliare, appeared in 1963. The title translates awkwardly into English—it's been published as Family Sayings, The Things We Used to Say, and Family Lexicon in different translations. The book is a memoir of her childhood and youth, told through the particular phrases and expressions her family used. Every family develops its own private language, its own inside jokes and repeated quotations. Natalia captured hers with such precision that readers felt they were overhearing real conversations.

The book won the Strega Prize, Italy's most prestigious literary award. It remains her most famous work.

The Intimacy of Domestic Life

What makes Ginzburg's writing distinctive is her focus on the small-scale. She wrote about apartments and living rooms, about the texture of daily family life. In a literary culture that often rewarded grand historical narratives or formal experimentation, she insisted on the significance of the domestic.

The novelist Jhumpa Lahiri, who has championed Ginzburg's work to English-speaking readers, has noted how Ginzburg uses physical spaces to map emotional terrain. Where characters sit, what they can see from their windows, which café they choose for a difficult conversation—these details carry the weight of meaning.

This approach made her work perfect for Speechify and other text-to-speech tools, though of course she never knew such things would exist. Her sentences are clear and direct. Her paragraphs breathe. She doesn't show off or obscure. She wants you to understand exactly what she means.

The Plays

Less well known outside Italy are Ginzburg's plays. She wrote over a dozen of them, starting in the mid-1960s. Her most famous, L'inserzione—The Advertisement—was performed at the Old Vic theatre in London in 1968, directed by Laurence Olivier and starring Joan Plowright.

The plays share the concerns of her fiction: family dynamics, the difficulty of communication between people who love each other, the way domestic spaces shape relationships. But they also gave her a chance to experiment with dialogue in a purer form, stripped of narration.

Late Career and Politics

Gabriele Baldini died in 1969, leaving Natalia a widow for the second time. She continued writing and became increasingly involved in politics.

Political engagement was nothing new for her. Like many Italian anti-Fascists of her generation, she had been a member of the Italian Communist Party for a time in the 1930s. But in 1983, at age sixty-six, she took a more direct role: she was elected to the Italian Parliament as an independent member, representing Rome.

She served until shortly before her death in 1991. She was seventy-five years old.

An Unexpected Film Appearance

There's a curious footnote to Ginzburg's artistic life. In 1964, the director Pier Paolo Pasolini made a film called The Gospel According to St. Matthew—a stark, powerful retelling of Matthew's Gospel, shot in black and white with mostly non-professional actors. Pasolini was a Marxist and an atheist, but he approached the story with deep seriousness, and the result is considered one of the greatest religious films ever made.

Natalia Ginzburg appears in it. She plays Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus, whom Jesus raises from the dead. It's a small role, but there's something fitting about it: a secular Jewish writer who had come to identify with Christ playing a woman who witnessed one of his most famous miracles.

What She Left Behind

Ginzburg's novels have been translated into English multiple times, with new translations still appearing. Her essay collection Le piccole virtù—The Little Virtues—is particularly beloved. The title comes from her argument that we should teach children the great virtues, like courage and generosity, rather than the little virtues, like thrift and caution. The essays range widely, covering her experiences in wartime exile, her methods as a writer, her thoughts on shoes and silence and cities.

In 2020, the New York Review of Books reissued two of her shorter novels, Valentino and Sagittarius, in a single volume. At the book launch, Jhumpa Lahiri and the essayist Cynthia Zarin discussed why Ginzburg still matters—why a writer so focused on Italian domestic life in the mid-twentieth century continues to find readers around the world.

Part of it is her clarity. Part of it is her refusal to dramatize. She wrote about terrible things—war, loss, torture, death—but without sensationalism. She trusted that if she described what happened simply and precisely, readers would understand. She didn't need to tell you how to feel.

And part of it is her subject matter. Families are universal. Everyone knows what it's like to sit around a dinner table with people you love and find maddening. Everyone knows the particular phrases their own family uses, the jokes that no outsider would understand. Ginzburg took that universal experience and rendered it with such specificity that readers recognize themselves.

A Life in Works

For readers who want to explore Ginzburg's writing, here's a map of the terrain:

Her fiction ranges from early short novels like The Road to the City (1942) and The Dry Heart (1947) through her masterpiece Family Lexicon (1963) to later works like Dear Michael (1973) and The City and the House (1984). Many of her novels have been translated multiple times, which means readers can choose between different English versions.

Her essays are collected in The Little Virtues (1962) and several other volumes, some of which haven't been fully translated. The essays show a different side of her talent—more argumentative, more directly personal, but with the same clear prose.

Her plays are harder to find in English, though translations exist. The Advertisement is probably the most accessible starting point.

She won the Strega Prize in 1963 and the Bagutta Prize in 1984. In 1991, the year she died, she was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences—recognition that her work had found an audience far beyond Italy.

The Quiet Authority of Witness

What comes through most powerfully in Ginzburg's work is the authority of witness. She lived through Fascism, war, the murder of her husband, the reconstruction of Italian society. She watched her country tear itself apart and rebuild. And she wrote about all of it, but always through the lens of ordinary life—the conversations at breakfast, the view from the window, the words families use without thinking.

She understood that history happens in kitchens and living rooms as much as in government buildings and battlefields. She understood that the way we talk to each other reveals who we are. And she had the skill to capture that talk, that life, in prose so clear it almost disappears, leaving only the thing itself.

That's why people keep reading her. That's why new translations keep appearing. Natalia Ginzburg told the truth about how people actually live, and that truth doesn't go out of date.