Abstract

In his beautiful and haunting novel The Garden of the Finzi‐Continis, Giorgio Bassani, the well known Jewish Italian writer, records the calm, happy life of the Jewish community of Ferrara, in north Italy, in the 1920s and 1930s, the growth of Fascism and the response of the Jewish and non‐Jewish Italians to it. The main characters are the wealthy, aristocratic family of the Finzi‐Continis and their friends and their response to the changing political climate in their town. It is also the unhappy love‐story of Giorgio and Micòl Finzi‐Continis. The novel ends with the deportation of all the family and the whole Jewish community to the concentration camps in Germany and their certain death.