Book Review : Rome’s Latter-Day Renaissance : OPEN CITY, Seven Writers in Postwar Rome; Edited and introduced by William Weaver; : Steerforth Press, $19, 462 pages

Anthologies can be tricky things, anthologies can be wonderful things. The tricky ones resemble those wildly ambitious restaurants with menus that run on for half a dozen pages trying to anticipate every customer’s wish or need; the wonderful ones, like intimate bistros, offer only a handful of dishes and prepare them with genuine flair. Their goal is both to satisfy and to stimulate the diner, so that he will return again and eat some more.

William Weaver’s “Open City: Seven Writers in Postwar Rome” is the bistro version of an anthology and a superb example of its kind. Inaugurating Steerforth Italia, a new imprint from the ever-elegant Steerforth Press, whose titles will span a wide spectrum of Italian culture and life, this book does what good anthologies are meant to do: It introduces the novice to a new subject, and it reconnects the experienced reader to treasures from his past.

A distinguished translator and Italophile for more than five decades, Weaver is himself an experienced and--for the purposes of this anthology, also an ideal--reader. The treasures from his reading past are at the same time treasures from his lived past: He knew many of these postwar Italian writers, and his vivid, gossipy, affectionate and nostalgic memoir-like introduction sets a lively tone for the selections that follow. The character sketch and dinner party remembrance may not be the most rigorous forms of literary criticism, but they do succeed in enticing the reader into their subjects’ orbit.

Weaver first came to Italy during the war, when he drove an ambulance for the British Army in Southern Italy. His long, often boring rounds were punctuated tantalizingly by occasions when he passed a sign with an arrow pointing to Rome, “the fabled, the perfect, the ideal answer to every dream.” Eventually, he made his way to the city and found that it lived up to his expectations--first as a walker’s paradise, free of the traffic, tourists and commercialization that would follow with modernization; second as the center of a cultural flowering that burst out after the hardship and bitterness of the war years.

“Open City” takes its name from Roberto Rossellini’s movie, which was shot in Rome within months of the city’s liberation. Not just during the war years, but for two decades--a whole generation--creative Italy was suppressed by Fascist rule and, as Weaver points out, was effectively cut off from the rest of the world. Now suddenly there was a surge of creativity: in film (Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti), in design and in letters, perhaps, above all.

Significant talents, some as yet untested, emerged into the new openness as though from long, wintry hibernation. Many had suffered hardship and bitterness during the war: Giorgio Bassani (“The Garden of the Finzi-Continis”) had been arrested; Carlo Emilio Gadda (“That Awful Mess on Via Merulana”) had been taken prisoner by the Germans and lost his brother in combat; Carlo Levi (“The Watch”) had been imprisoned; Ignazio Silone (“Bread and Wine”) had been in exile; Alberto Moravia (“Agostino”) and Else Morante (“House of Liars”) had hidden together in the mountains; Natalia Ginzberg (“Valentino”), the mother of three young children, lost her husband, Leone, a young scholar who was sentenced to death during the Resistance. Weaver quotes his farewell letter to his wife (“We must go on hoping that we will finally see each other again, and all these emotions will be composed and extinguished in our memory. . . .”), which served as a reality check in his own life, as a reminder that Rome, the “magic city of order and grace and amusement,” was also “the Rome of the Germans and the Fascists, of torture and death.”

As so often with anthologies, there is something frustrating about reading excerpts: The dish passes by the table, is sampled, then returns to the kitchen while forks are still hovering in the air. While as a provider of appetizers “Open City” is certainly a success, it also offers two complete works, and they are most welcome among the truncations. These are Alberto Moravia’s “Agostino,” a novella about adolescent awakening, which displays an unusual sexual openness for the period, and Ginzberg’s “Valentino,” a beautifully calibrated account of two siblings, a hard-working, sweetly long-suffering sister and her ne’er-do-well, pampered brother. As always in Ginzberg’s work, family life is captured with microscopic sharpness and an attunement to time’s power to devastate, edify and produce resignation. “Valentino” is a treasure among treasures indeed.