Mapped
History: A Novel
Elsa Morante
In wartime and postwar Rome, Ida Ramundo, a timid half-Jewish widowed schoolteacher, is raped by a young German soldier and bears a son, Useppe, and mother and child struggle to survive through bombing, deportation, hunger and the black market as 'History' grinds the powerless underfoot. Morante's great anti-war novel maps a real Rome: the poor quarter of San Lorenzo and its bombing, the Jewish Ghetto and its deportation, the refugee shelters, and the ravaged city where innocence cannot last.
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History (La Storia)
Elsa Morante
Morante's wartime and post-war Rome, from 1941 to 1947, seen from the poor quarters rather than the palaces. A half-Jewish schoolteacher and her small son move from the tenements of San Lorenzo through the rubble of the Allied bombing to a shelter on the city's rural edge, past the ghetto emptied in October 1943 and out to Testaccio. The map runs from the San Lorenzo district by the Verano cemetery, southwest to the old Jewish quarter and Testaccio, and northeast to the barracks of Pietralata.
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