Novella and Racconto : The Italian Short Story

Thanks to Giovanni Boccaccio, Italian short fiction occupies a central place in the history of this genre. However, it would be an error to think that the Decameron’s success erased the many existing alternative traditions. On the contrary, the strength of the Italian “novella” is strictly tied to its variety and the prestige of other models, including the literary folk tale (another Italian invention, mainly thanks to Giambattista Basile). In the 1880s, the rise of the “classic short story” was a real watershed, when authors had to shrink their stories because of the reduced space in the newspapers and magazines that published them: it was the season of Giovanni Verga and Federico De Roberto. The twentieth century was marked by the figures of Luigi Pirandello and Italo Calvino, and by the influence of Giacomo Leopardi’s Operette morali, the most original work of modern Italian fiction, unfortunately yet to be fully appreciated outside Italy.