Moravia, Alberto

(pseud. Alberto Pincherle, 1907–1990)

   One of Italy’s most prolific and controversial contemporary writers, Alberto Moravia was an exceptionally precocious novelist. Gli indifferenti (The Indifferent, 1929), his first novel, was published when he was hardly more than 20 years old. Many still regard this study of bored, corrupt, worthless, and indecisive upper-class Romans as his best work. Its sexual frankness won it a large audience, but its merciless depiction of the feebleness and rottenness of the Italian ruling class aroused the censure of the regime, and Moravia was obliged to leave Italy for exile in Mexico and the United States. Several of Moravia’s later novels were turned into films, the most successful being Il Conformista (The Conformist, 1952); Bernardo Bertolucci won his first Oscar for an adaptation of it. The influence of Moravia’s novel La Noia (literally “Boredom” but translated as The Empty Canvas) is very evident in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni. Both of these novels were of the same existentialist genre as Gli indifferenti, but Moravia also wrote several realist novels, the best of which is probably La Romana (1947). Moravia was close politically and personally to the leaders of the Partito Comunista Italiano/Italian Communist Party (PCI). In the 1960s, he made a much-publicized visit to revolutionary China and wrote a somewhat naive account of what he saw there. In 1986, he married the young Spanish novelist Carmen Llera; he had previously been married to the Italian novelists Elsa Morante and Dacia Moraini. Moravia died in Rome in 1990.

   See also Cinema; Literature.