Postface: Meetings with Remarkable Italians

During the time I lived in Rome in the early 1980s, I interviewed a number of Italian writers for the London Magazine, edited by the poet Alan Ross. The memories I have of meeting Italo Calvino, Natalia Ginzburg, Alberto Moravia, and Leonardo Sciascia are still vivid in my mind; they add color (and, I hope, depth) to the thoughts and reflections I offer here on these four “Remarkable Italians.” Much of the verse Alan himself wrote in the 1950s and 1960s is set in Rome, and my essay on Pier Paolo Pasolini is indebted to Alan’s example. Without Alan’s encouragement to “keep going” with my Italian interests in Rome, I would not have been so bold as to seek out a generation of Italy’s greatest writers—a generation now long since gone. The interlinked essays do not pretend to be academic; rather, they are personal appreciations.