History: A Novel

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.

Ida

San Lorenzo

The poor quarter

In the crowded working-class quarter of San Lorenzo, the fearful, half-Jewish schoolteacher Ida raises her children and hides the assault that has left her pregnant with Useppe. Morante sets her story among the Roman poor, whose small, threatened lives will bear the full weight of a war and a history made far above their heads.

The early chapters

explicit Ida and her family live in San Lorenzo, the real working-class district of Rome by the rail yards; sited there.

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