Giorgio Bassani; Wrote of Italy’s Jews in ‘Finzi-Continis’

Giorgio Bassani, an Italian writer who described the lives of Jews under Fascism and is best remembered for a novel that became an Oscar-winning film, “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” died Thursday. He was 74.

Bassani had for years been ill with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. His longtime companion, Portia Prebys, said he had been hospitalized recently with heart trouble. He died at Rome’s San Camillo hospital.

A native of Bologna and graduate of the University of Bologna, Bassani lived much of his life in the nearby provincial Renaissance town of Ferrara, whose Jewish life was the wellspring for most of his literary works.

“The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” first published in 1962, tells the story of an aristocratic Jewish family whose beautiful estate serves as a haven--though only a temporary, illusory one--against a menacing outside world during World War II. Amid increasingly harsh anti-Semitic edicts by Mussolini that set the stage for the deportation and persecution of Italy’s Jews, the characters live a cloistered and romantic life within its garden walls.

Widely translated, the novel was made into a film by director Vittorio De Sica; it won the Academy Award for best foreign film in 1971. It also elevated Dominique Sanda to stardom. Although the film was praised by critics for its subtlety and poetic melancholy, Bassani had a falling-out with the filmmakers and demanded that the movie be described only as “freely adapted” from his novel.

A restored version of the film was released 25 years later to renewed critical acclaim.

In the novel, the main character, Giorgio, nurses a painful and unrequited love for its doomed heroine, Micol Finzi-Contini. Her real-life identity was the subject of considerable speculation over the years, but Bassani described the character as a composite of several women he had admired and loved.

Bassani’s first published work was “A City in Ruins” in 1940, written under the pseudonym Giacomo Marchi.

Jailed by the Fascists during the war, Bassani afterward embarked on his literary career under his own name. He won Italy’s prestigious Strega literary award in 1956 for “Five Stories About Ferrara,” and was editor of the literary journal Botteghe Oscure and for several years of Paragone.

Among his other prizes were the Viareggio prize in 1962 for “Garden,” the Charles Veillon prize in Italian literature, the Campiello prize, the Nelly Sachs prize and the Premi Roma.

Bassani was also a poet, a vocation that his companion Prebys, an American-born professor of comparative literature, said was closest to his heart.

The writer was long separated from his wife, Valeria Sinigallia, with whom he had two children. His later years were marked by acrimonious court battles, during which the family sought to have Bassani declared incompetent to manage his financial affairs.

However, the Italian news agency ANSA reported that the parties in the end put aside their rancor and were together at Bassani’s deathbed.