(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

Giorgio Bassani’s acclaimed novel of unrequited love and the plight of the Italian Jews on the brink of World War II has become a classic of modern Italian literature.

Made into an Academy Award—winning film in 1970, The Garden of the Finzi—Continis is a richly evocative and nostalgic depiction of prewar Italy. The narrator, a young middle-class Jew in the Italian city of Ferrara, has long been fascinated from afar by the Finzi-Continis, a wealthy and aristocratic Jewish family, and especially by their daughter Micol. But it is not until 1938 that he is invited behind the walls of their lavish estate, as local Jews begin to gather there to avoid the racial laws of the Fascists, and the garden of the Finzi-Continis becomes an idyllic sanctuary in an increasingly brutal world. Years after the war, the narrator returns in memory to his doomed relationship with the lovely Micol, and to the predicament that faced all the Ferrarese Jews, in this unforgettably wrenching portrait of a community about to be destroyed by the world outside the garden walls.

喬治•巴薩尼（Giorgio Bassani，1916-2000），意大利猶太裔小說傢、詩人，斯特雷加文學奬、維亞雷焦文學奬、坎皮耶羅文學奬得主，其代錶作《芬奇-孔蒂尼花園》由意大利新現實主義大師德•西卡改編為同名電影（一譯《費尼茲花園》），獲柏林電影節金熊奬、奧斯卡最佳外語片兩項殊榮。