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Authors by Country · ItalyThe Best Italian Authors to Read
Italian literature runs from Dante, whose Divine Comedy helped create the Italian language, to the novelists who now sell widely in English translation. In between come Pirandello’s plays about identity, Primo Levi’s testimony from Auschwitz, Calvino’s experiments with form and Eco’s medieval mysteries. A strong line of women writers, from Elsa Morante and Natalia Ginzburg to Elena Ferrante and Donatella Di Pietrantonio, runs through the twentieth century and into the present.
This list is ordered chronologically by year of birth, from Dante (born around 1265) to Paolo Cognetti (born 1978); Elena Ferrante, whose birth year is not public, comes last. It mixes canonical names with living writers, and every author has at least one book in English. For each one there is a suggested first book, with its original publication year.
Twelve Italian authors, and where to start with each
Dante Alighieri
c. 1265–1321 · Florence, Italy
Dante’s Divine Comedy follows a traveller through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, guided first by the Roman poet Virgil and later by Beatrice. Along the way it deals with sin, justice, exile, Florentine politics, theology and philosophy. Writing in the Tuscan vernacular rather than Latin, he helped establish the language that became modern Italian.
He wrote the Comedy in exile from Florence, after 1301, and died in Ravenna in 1321. His earlier Vita Nuova mixes poems and prose about his love for Beatrice. Many English translations of both are in print.
Read Dante if you want to read the poem that sits underneath much of European literature.
Start with Inferno (c. 1317). The first part of the Divine Comedy: a journey down through the nine circles of Hell, where sinners are punished according to their offences. Or Vita Nuova (c. 1294). A short book of love poems for Beatrice linked by prose commentary, written before the Comedy.
All Dante Alighieri books →Italo Svevo
1861–1928 · Trieste (then Austrian Empire), Italy
Italo Svevo was the pen name of Aron Hector Schmitz, a businessman from Trieste. His novels are psychological and ironic, built around self-deceiving men from the comfortable middle class. Smoking, illness, marriage and the gap between good intentions and actual behaviour are recurring subjects, and his narrators rarely tell the whole truth about themselves.
James Joyce taught him English in Trieste from 1907, championed Zeno’s Conscience and helped bring it to French readers; Svevo is often named as a model for Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. The novel is available in English in William Weaver’s translation.
Read Svevo if you like unreliable narrators and dry, self-mocking comedy.
Start with Zeno’s Conscience (1923). On his psychoanalyst’s advice, Zeno Cosini writes about his attempts to quit smoking, his father’s death, his marriage and his business dealings. Or As a Man Grows Older (1898). His second novel, about a Trieste clerk’s affair with a younger woman.
All Italo Svevo books →Luigi Pirandello
1867–1936 · Agrigento, Sicily, Italy
Pirandello wrote plays, novels and hundreds of short stories about identity: how people perform roles, how others see them differently from how they see themselves, and where reality ends and illusion begins. His work mixes humour with unease, and characters often discover that there is no stable self underneath the masks.
He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934. His play Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), in which unfinished characters interrupt a rehearsal, changed modern theatre. His novels are an easier way in than the plays.
Read Pirandello if you are drawn to questions of identity and like your philosophy with jokes.
Start with The Late Mattia Pascal (1904). A man who is mistakenly declared dead seizes the chance to start a new life under a new name, and finds it harder than expected. Or Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921). A play in which six characters abandoned by their author turn up at a theatre rehearsal and demand to have their story staged.
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
1896–1957 · Palermo, Sicily, Italy
Lampedusa, a Sicilian prince, wrote one novel. The Leopard follows Prince Fabrizio of Salina as Garibaldi’s forces arrive in Sicily and the old aristocracy gives way to a rising middle class. It is a book about decline, compromise and time, told with irony and a close eye for houses, landscapes and manners.
He died in Rome in 1957 before the novel was published. It appeared in 1958, won the Strega Prize in 1959, and was filmed by Luchino Visconti in 1963. The English translation by Archibald Colquhoun was first published in 1960.
Read Lampedusa if you like slow, elegiac historical novels about the end of a world.
Start with The Leopard (1958). During the Risorgimento, a Sicilian prince watches his class and his family lose their place to new money, and accepts it with resignation.
Elsa Morante
1912–1985 · Rome, Italy
Morante wrote long, intense novels about childhood, mothers, obsessive love and the stories people invent to escape a hard reality. Her characters are often children or outsiders, and her books move between fairy-tale atmosphere and close historical detail. She was one of the most important Italian novelists of the twentieth century.
Arturo’s Island won the Strega Prize in 1957. History (1974) follows a widowed teacher and her son in Rome during and after the Second World War. Both are available in English, and Lies and Sorcery, a new translation of her first novel, appeared in 2023.
Read Morante if you want a coming-of-age novel with the atmosphere of a fable.
Start with Arturo’s Island (1957). A boy grows up almost alone on the island of Procida, idolising his absent father until a young stepmother arrives. Or History (1974). A widowed schoolteacher and her young son try to survive in Rome during and after the Second World War.
Natalia Ginzburg
1916–1991 · Palermo, Sicily, Italy
Ginzburg wrote short novels, essays and memoir in a plain, precise style about families, marriage, friendship and the effect of Fascism and war on ordinary lives. Much of her work draws on her own background in a Jewish-Italian family in Turin. Her sentences are simple, but her books are full of humour and grief.
Family Lexicon won the Strega Prize in 1963 and remains her best-known book. Her essays in The Little Virtues are often recommended to new readers. Several of her novels, including The Dry Heart and Voices in the Evening, are in print in English.
Read Ginzburg if you like family stories told with understatement and dry wit.
Start with Family Lexicon (1963). A memoir of her family in Turin, told through the phrases and sayings they repeated, set against Fascism, war and persecution. Or The Little Virtues (1962). A collection of short personal essays on subjects including exile, friendship, work and raising children.
All Natalia Ginzburg books →Primo Levi
1919–1987 · Turin, Italy
Primo Levi was a chemist from Turin who survived Auschwitz. His books describe the camp and its aftermath in calm, exact prose, asking what happens to human dignity, responsibility and memory under extreme conditions. He also wrote stories and essays in which science and work are central.
If This Is a Man (1947), published in the US as Survival in Auschwitz, is one of the most widely read accounts of the Holocaust. The Periodic Table (1975) links chapters of his life to chemical elements. The Drowned and the Saved (1986) returns to the camps in essay form.
Read Levi if you want to understand the Holocaust through a clear, unsentimental witness.
Start with If This Is a Man (1947). Levi’s account of his time as a prisoner in Auschwitz and of how the camp worked. Or The Periodic Table (1975). A collection of pieces, each named after a chemical element, combining memoir, fiction and reflections on chemistry.
Italo Calvino
1923–1985 · Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba
Calvino began in post-war realism and moved into fable, fantasy and formal experiment. His books play with structure: a novel made of beginnings of other novels, a city atlas told to Kublai Khan, stories narrated by a being as old as the universe. He was influenced by the French Oulipo group.
Born in Cuba and raised in Liguria, he also collected and retold Italian Folktales (1956). Invisible Cities and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller are the most widely read of his books in English, and both are short.
Read Calvino if you enjoy short, playful books that experiment with form.
Start with Invisible Cities (1972). Marco Polo describes dozens of imaginary cities to the emperor Kublai Khan, each one a short prose poem about memory, desire or signs. Or If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979). A novel about a reader trying to finish a novel, made up of the openings of ten different books.
All Italo Calvino books →Umberto Eco
1932–2016 · Alessandria, Italy
Eco was a semiotician, medievalist and cultural critic who turned to fiction in his late forties. His novels are full of books, codes, conspiracies and arguments about interpretation, combining detective plots with history and philosophy. He also wrote widely read essays on mass media, popular culture and fascism.
The Name of the Rose (1980) appeared in English in 1983 and became an international bestseller. Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) follows three editors whose invented conspiracy theory starts to be taken seriously. He died in Milan in 2016.
Read Eco if you like a detective story stacked with history, libraries and ideas.
Start with The Name of the Rose (1980). A murder mystery set in a fourteenth-century Italian monastery, investigated by a Franciscan friar and his young novice. Or Foucault’s Pendulum (1988). Three Milanese editors invent a grand occult conspiracy as a game, and others start to believe it.
Donatella Di Pietrantonio
Born 1962 · Arsita, Italy
Di Pietrantonio worked as a paediatric dentist before becoming a full-time novelist. Her books are set in the mountains and small towns of Abruzzo and deal with mothers and daughters, sisters, abandonment and violence, in short chapters and spare language. Her novels are short and tightly focused on a few characters.
A Girl Returned won the Campiello Prize in 2017 and was published in English by Europa Editions in 2019, translated by Ann Goldstein. L’età fragile (2023) won the Strega Prize in 2024; Borgo Sud appeared in English as A Sister’s Story.
Read Di Pietrantonio if you liked the Neapolitan Novels and want something shorter.
Start with A Girl Returned (2017). At thirteen, a girl learns that the parents who raised her were not her birth parents and is sent back to a poor family she has never known. Or A Sister’s Story (2020). A sequel to A Girl Returned, following the narrator and her younger sister as adults.
Paolo Cognetti
Born 1978 · Milan, Italy
Cognetti writes about mountains, friendship, fathers and sons, and the pull between city and wilderness. He started with short stories and books about New York, then moved to the Alps, where most of his recent writing is set. His style is quiet and direct, close to nature writing.
The Eight Mountains won the Strega Prize in 2017 and the Prix Médicis étranger, and was adapted into a film in 2022. His memoir The Wild Boy describes a season alone in an Alpine hut.
Read Cognetti if you like novels about friendship, fathers and the outdoors.
Start with The Eight Mountains (2016). Two boys, one from Milan and one from a mountain village, form a friendship over summers in the Alps that lasts into adulthood. Or The Wild Boy (2013). A memoir of a spring and summer spent alone in a hut in the Alps.
Elena Ferrante
Debut 1992 · Naples, Italy (setting of her novels)
Elena Ferrante is the pen name of an Italian novelist whose identity has been kept private since her first book in 1992. Her novels are about women’s friendships, mothers and daughters, marriage, class and violence, most of them set in and around Naples. Her narrators are frank about anger, envy and ambition.
The four Neapolitan Novels (2011–2014), beginning with My Brilliant Friend, follow two friends over six decades. They were translated by Ann Goldstein and adapted for HBO and RAI. The Story of the Lost Child was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2016.
Read Ferrante if you want a long, absorbing story about friendship, rivalry and class.
Start with My Brilliant Friend (2011). The first of the Neapolitan Novels, following Elena and Lila from childhood in a poor neighbourhood of Naples in the 1950s. Or The Days of Abandonment (2002). A short novel about a woman in Turin whose life falls apart after her husband leaves her.
All Elena Ferrante books →Which Italian author should you read first?
The best starting point depends on what you want from a book.
- For a first taste of the classics — Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard (1958)
- For a long, absorbing series — Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (2011)
- For a short, playful book — Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972)
- For a historical mystery — Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (1980)
- For memoir and witness — Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (1947)
- For a recent prize-winner — Paolo Cognetti, The Eight Mountains (2016)
Where to go next
Frequently asked questions
Who is the most famous Italian author?
Dante Alighieri is the most influential, because the Divine Comedy shaped the Italian language and European literature. Among modern writers, Elena Ferrante, Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco are the most widely read in English.
Which Italian authors have won the Nobel Prize in Literature?
On this list, Luigi Pirandello won in 1934. Other Italian laureates, such as Grazia Deledda, Eugenio Montale and Dario Fo, are not included here.
What is the best Italian novel to start with?
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa is a good first classic. For contemporary fiction, start with Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend or Paolo Cognetti’s The Eight Mountains.
Who is Elena Ferrante?
Elena Ferrante is a pen name; the author has kept her identity private since her first novel in 1992. She is best known for the four Neapolitan Novels, translated into English by Ann Goldstein.
What is the Strega Prize?
The Strega Prize is Italy’s best-known literary award for fiction. Winners on this list include Lampedusa (1959), Elsa Morante (1957), Natalia Ginzburg (1963), Paolo Cognetti (2017) and Donatella Di Pietrantonio (2024).
Which Italian authors should I read if I like Elena Ferrante?
Try Elsa Morante for intense novels of childhood and family, Natalia Ginzburg for family life told plainly, and Donatella Di Pietrantonio, whose A Girl Returned was translated by Ferrante’s translator, Ann Goldstein.
Start with the author whose questions interest you most. The book you remember longest may not be the one with the clearest answers, but the one that changes how you see something familiar.
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