NEWS The Garden of the Finzi-Continis Featured in the Italian School-Leaving Examination

By Pagine Ebraiche staff

An excerpt of the Italian Jewish writer Giorgio Bassani was selected as one of the choices for the first exam of the “maturità”, the school leaving examination that Italian students have to pass to
graduate from high school. The first exam requires students to analyze a literary text or to write an essay on a range of topics.

The excerpt was from the book “Il giardino dei Finzi Contini” (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis), one of the deepest and most touching works on the Shoah in Italy. It is set in the city of Ferrara that today is home to the first National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah, a project carried out also to honor Bassani himself, who was also an active anti-Fascist.

The passage chosen by the Ministry of Education is related to the expulsion of the protagonist from the city library after the Racial Laws against the Jews, promulgated by Mussolini in 1938.

It was chosen by 18.5% of Italian students and it aroused strong emotions by the public.

“The proposal of a topic devoted to the eightieth anniversary of the promulgation of the Racial Laws through the words of Bassani is a highly meaningful choice,” highlighted the President of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities Noemi Di Segni.

“I’m very impressed, I feel it was a wonderful surprise. At the same time, however, I find it almost normal, because my father was a great Italian patriot who, beyond his personal, ferocious and cruel experience as a Jew, spoke about facts concerning Italy and the world whole,” added his daughter Paola.

Born in 1916, Bassani was a novelist, but also poet, essayist, and editor. He passed away in 2000.

There are at least three English translations of his masterpiece and the novel inspired a very successful film by Vittorio De Sica, that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and was nominated for Best Screenplay. It also won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Festival.