Literary places in Ferrara

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

Giorgio Bassani

In Ferrara at the end of the 1930s, the narrator, a young Jewish man, is drawn into the walled world of the aristocratic Finzi-Contini family and their vast private garden, where he falls hopelessly in love with the elusive Micòl as the fascist race laws close a ring around them all. Bassani maps his own city: the great garden behind the walls off Corso Ercole I d'Este, the ramparts the young people cycle along, the synagogue on Via Mazzini, and the monumental Jewish cemetery where the book begins and the family's tomb waits.

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