Natalia Levi, known as Ginzburg by her husband’s surname, is one of the most famous Italian writers of the 20th century. Her literature has a strong social content. Not in vain did she suffer exile accompanying her husband due to his anti-fascist and communist ideas, linked to the Einaudi publishing house in Turin, during Mussolini’s fascism.
This little book contains four stories, the longest of which is the most interesting. The Road to the City is the author’s first novel where she recounts the life of a poor family in an Italian village in the 1940’s. The children’s desire to get out of poverty and integrate themselves at all costs to the urban, more modern and advanced society lowered their moral principles, boosted by hunger and lack of culture. Natalia Ginzburg saw this environment during her exile in Pizzoli, a small town in Abruzzo, where she remained until 1943. She describes it as if it were the script of a neo-realist film.
The rest of the three short stories, The City and the House, My Husband and An Absence, have marriage as their central theme - marriage that is seen as meaningless, where man and woman unite in order to achieve a social position and offer an image of normalcy, where each one lives his life and his infidelities. The author, with the bitterness that characterizes her, wants to present marriage as a formalism, a facade before the society, a hypocrisy.