[paola]

an Italian slant :-) on my TBR list

Alberto Moravia, Agostino,

Spoiler:

Thirteen-year-old Agostino is spending the summer at a Tuscan seaside resort with his beautiful widowed mother. When she takes up with a cocksure new companion, Agostino, feeling ignored and unloved, begins hanging around with a group of local young toughs. Though repelled by their squalor and brutality, and repeatedly humiliated for his weakness and ignorance when it comes to women and sex, the boy is increasingly, masochistically drawn to the gang and its rough games. He finds himself unable to make sense of his troubled feelings. Hoping to be full of manly calm, he is instead beset by guilty curiosity and an urgent desire to sever, at any cost, the thread of troubled sensuality that binds him to his mother.

Alberto Moravia’s classic, startling portrait of innocence lost was written in 1942 but rejected by Fascist censors and not published until 1944, when it became a best seller and secured the author the first literary prize of his career. Revived here in a new translation by Michael F. Moore, Agostino is poised to captivate a twenty-first-century audience.

Niccolo' Ammanniti, I am not scared (Io non ho paura) (don't be fooled by the blurb from Amazon, there are no monsters or nothing supernatural here):

Spoiler:

A sweltering heat wave hits a tiny village in Southern Italy, sending the adults to seek shelter, while their children bicycle freely throughout the countryside, playing games and getting into trouble. On a dare, nine-year-old Michele Amitrano enters an old, abandoned farmhouse, where he stumbles upon a secret so terrible that he can’t tell anybody. As the truth emerges, Michele learns that the horror in the creepy old house is closer to home than he ever imagined.

A widely acclaimed international bestseller, I’m Not Scared is a spine-tingling novel that combines a coming of age narrative with a satisfying, enthralling story of suspense.

Maria Corti (transl. Jessie Bright", Otranto

Spoiler:

One of Italy's leading writers recounts the sack of Otranto by the Turks in 1480. Like the film "Rashomon" or Robert Browning's "The Ring and the Book," this novel relates the events in overlapping tales told by survivors and victims. As "Otranto" weaves its web of memories, it also focuses on the beauty of everyday life: the essence of place - the fragrance of oleander, the feel of new linen and old wood, the sky, sea and wind, lovers and friends. Corti's style is riveting, her eye for detail compelling.

Not by an Italian author, but set during summer in Venice:
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice:

Spoiler:

Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to his erotic doom.

In the decaying city, besieged by an unnamed epidemic, he becomes obsessed with an exquisite Polish boy, Tadzio. "It is the story of the voluptuousness of doom," Mann wrote. "But the problem I had especially in mind was that of the artist's dignity."