History (La Storia)

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.

Ida Ramundo

The tenement in San Lorenzo

1941

The novel opens with a widowed, half-Jewish schoolteacher living in a cramped flat in San Lorenzo, the dense working-class quarter beside the railway east of the centre. An encounter with a German soldier early in the war leaves her pregnant with the small son whose short life the book follows. San Lorenzo, built up for railway and market workers in the late nineteenth century, is the ground the story starts from.

Part one, 1941

inferred Morante sets the schoolteacher's flat firmly in the San Lorenzo district, but gives no exact address, so this marks the residential heart of the quarter southwest of the Verano cemetery.

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