The portrayal of the Second World War in the early works of Francesca Duranti and Rosetta Loy

Abstract

Like many other novelists, Francesca Duranti and Rosetta Loy concern themselves in their first books, La Bambina (1976) and La bicicletta (1974), with the subject of growing up, and make extensive use of autobiographical material. Duranti, indeed, while presenting La Bambina as a 'romanzo', has made it clear that the book is completely autobiographical, and that the child protagonist Francesca is her own younger self.1 Italian novelists of their generation, however, Loy was born in 1931 and Duranti in 1935, and both were in their forties when they began to publish fiction experienced a childhood overshadowed by the Second World War.2 The war is thus an important theme in both works. Towards the end of La Bambina Duranti even goes so far as to suggest a parallelism between her protagonist on the threshold of adolescence and the country on the verge of the new, unknown post-war era: Francesca meets two ex-partisans who, now that the war is over, seem bewildered about the future: