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TETTO MURATO

Lalla Romano

A diamond-sharp, Italian classic about the mysterious relationships between two partisan couples in German-occupied Italy in the wintry mountains of Piemonte. This hauntingly beautiful, sharply modern novel of WWII is perfect for fans of Tove Ditlevsen, Rachel Cusk, and Lucia Berlin.
This is a captivating classic novel that inhabits the silent spaces between historic events, depicting the mysterious luminosity of human relationships in extraordinary circumstances. In prose of subtle, enigmatic atmospheres and acutely precise images, Lalla Romano evokes both the tension and the stillness of life in occupied Italy.

Sheltering from the war in a provincial town outside of Turin, Giulia and her husband Stefano feel an instant affinity with Ada and Paolo: she a spontaneous, vibrant young woman, he a sickly intellectual, a teacher and partisan in hiding.

As the Germans begin to occupy Italy, a subtle dance of attractions between the couples begins, intensified by their shared isolation and the muffled hum of threat over a long, hard winter.

In a highly successful literary career that spanned much of the twentieth century, the Piedmontese writer and painter Lalla Romano published nineteen novels and collections of short stories, three books of poetry, several photo texts, and numerous prose works and translations. Romano's writing was admired by many of the most important and influential Italian writers of the twentieth century, such as Eugenio Montale, Elio Vittorini, and Italo Calvino, and it played an important role in the greater recognition of a tradition of women's writing that slowly developed in Italy in the latter part of the century. She was indeed one of relatively few twentieth-century Italian women writers to win both critical and popular acclaim.

Born in 1906, Lalla Romano's first poetry collection was published with the support of Eugenio Montale. The exacting and powerful language of Tetto murato (1957), as well as the book's gripping character dynamics, reflects Romano's maturity as a novelist. Following its critical success, she solidified her position as one of Italy's most renowned writers with novels such as La penombra che abbiamo attraversato (The Penumbra, previously published in English by Quartet Books rights are currently available) and Le parole tra noi leggere (Small Words Between Us), for which she won the country's most prestigious literary prize, the Premio Strega, in 1969.
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Published 2025-10-24 by Einaudi

Comments

When a book is praised by three of Italy's greatest 20th-century writers Giorgio Bassani, Italo Calvino and Natalia Ginzburg you pay attention. through short scenes and spare dialogue, Romano successfully creates a mood of stasis, anticipation and guilt.

Subtle and captivating. A heightened sensitivity that never falters.

UK and US: Pushkin Press

Reading this beguiling book was not unlike watching light and shadow complicate the surface of a still, deep pool of summer water. Hats off to Brian Robert Moore for the stunning translation.

Exquisite.

Romano writes in a dreamlike present, which is to say the present that appears to us in dreams. clear and full of shadows, concrete and out of reach.

I was struck straightaway by the singular force of her taut, meditative, sorrowful writing.

Successful to the point of perfection. There's not a word, not a sentence in the novel that doesn't add to the refined musicverging on silencethat's so characteristic of [Romano].

Her work deserves to be read alongside other titans of 20th-century Italian literature such as Natalia Ginzburg, Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino (all of whom knew and revered her). Told with magnificent restraint, and without the tensions ever breaking the novel's serene, crystalline structure, A Silence Shared is a wonderful taste of Romano's work.