IGNAZIO SILONE ANDIL RISVEGLIO: THE I945 VERSION OF SILONE'SFONTAMARA

Abstract

AbstractIgnazio Silane was much given to revising and rewriting his novels, so much so that he once compared himself to those medieval monks ‘whose entire lives were devoted to painting the face of Christ over and over again’. He described himself, in his revision of FONTAMARA, as having ‘painted the picture all over again from top to bottom, using the old canvas and frame’. This rewriting process has naturally attracted the attention of critics and scholars, but the value of much of their discussion has been limited by an inadequate view of the publication history of the novel, caused in part by the difficulty one inevitably experiences in obtaining copies of texts which were printed in short runs and in cheap editions, and were not collected by Italian libraries. Silone's own comments do not help, either; he clearly writes in such a way as to imply that there were only two Italian versions of FONTAMARA, whereas there are in fact four, although one, the 1945 version, was published only in part. The purpo...