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Katia Pizzi. A City in Search of an Author: the Literary Identity of Trieste.

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Katia Pizzi. A City in Search of an Author: The Literary Identity of Trieste. London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001.

Katia Pizzi might have titled her book "A City with Many Authors" since the evidence she provides to examine "the literary identity of Trieste in the Twentieth century ... between 1918 and 1954" (28) unearths a plethora of writers whose multifarious agendas in the end render impossible her stated goal of allowing the reader to grasp a unitary sense of a literary Triestine identity. The book, however, is successful in highlighting the literary activity that ran concurrently with the intellectual and political life of this most troubled Italian city before, during and after the two World Wars.

Pizzi's book opens with a chronology of the cultural life of Trieste between 1910 and 1996. This overview provides factual information that is pertinent to the author's thesis, but also includes irrelevant trivia: one wonders why is it important to know that Trieste "was returned as one of the cities with the highest percentages of alcoholics in the whole of Italy" in 1928, or that the first showing of a cinematic sound feature in Triestine theaters occurred on May 7, 1929 (15); finally why should one know that on January 15, 1950, the boxer Tiberio Mitri married the former Miss Italia, Fulvia Franco (21)? These and other details are never brought to bear on the critical analysis that follows; and one wonders why the...

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