I was in Rome when I first encountered Natalia Ginzburg’s The Road that Goes to the City, in a bookstore on the Campo di Fiori just steps from where, in 1600, the philosopher Giordano Bruno was executed for heresy. A bronze statue of Bruno looms over the square, a reminder of what can happen when you insist on your truth. I felt like a heretic myself then, albeit a minor one, routinely denounced not by the Church, but by my mother, for various shortcomings related to clothing, makeup, and romance. Focused on mothers and daughters, specifically on the petty yet epic conflicts that can erupt between them, Ginzburg’s short novel mirrored my own preoccupations. I absorbed the story a haze of identification, entranced by the portrait of a provincial girl struggling to liberate herself from her mother’s good opinion.

First published as La Strada che va in Cittá, the novel appeared in 1942 under a pseudonym because Mussolini had outlawed publications by Jews. Ginzburg had drafted it the year before, after she and her husband, a writer and anti-fascist activist, were internally exiled with their young children in a remote Italian village. An English translation appeared in 1949 and seems to have been reissued at least once since then, by New Directions, but fresh translations of most of Ginzburg’s works are urgently needed, and I am so glad we have this one, rendered in swift and sparkling prose by the writer and translator Gini Alhadeff.

The Road begins with a family, five children and two adults, crammed into a small red house “with a pergola in front.” The pergola suggests domestic ease, but nothing in this chaotic household is easy: chickens invade the kitchen; a single record turns endlessly on the gramophone, giving everyone the same earworm; and space is so tight, the bannister doubles as a clothesline. Reaching adolescence, the children dream of going to “the city,” an unnamed haven of shady parks and dim hotel rooms, places of mystery and excitement, not like home at all. Or so they think.

Sixteen-year-old Delia’s imagination is fired especially by the antics of her older sister, Azalea, a newlywed who lives with her husband in an apartment in the city. To Delia, Azalea seems enviably free, an emblem of the more capacious world Delia wants to join. But Ginzburg leaves room for doubt about Delia’s perceptions, and in this complication of perspective Ginzburg clues the reader into the disappointments that await. Ginzburg touch is light, however, and she arranges her foreshadowing in a drolly minor key. For example: When Azalea suffers through the end of an operatically miserable love affair, Delia joins the maid in burning some incriminating letters, which, of course, they also read aloud as children underfoot chase burning bits of paper. It is a fun scene, but the reader knows that it’s also a crazy one, fraught with mindless risk.

The city seems like, and to some extent is, a site of liberation, a place to find jobs and opportunities. For Delia, however, the city is primarily where one loses things: family, friends, self. But if the city is risky, it’s still preferable to home, which is a source of unbearable shame, for which Delia blames her mother: “I hated our house. I hated the green and bitter soup our mother placed before us every evening and I hated our mother. I would have been ashamed of her if I’d come across her in the city.” 

For her part, Delia’s mother is maddened by disappointment, old hopes that are only weakly realized by things like that disused pergola. She tells the same story over and over, another gramophone with a single record on repeat. “When my mother was young,” Delia reports, “a court clerk had fallen in love with her and taken her to Milan. My mother had stayed there a few days, but then she had come back. She told the story repeatedly, saying she’d gone away because she was tired of the children … ‘I wish I’d never come back,’ my mother would say, with her fingers mopping her tears all over her face.” Her loneliness is acute. She never stops talking, Delia reports, “but I never answered. No one ever answered her.” 

Everything changes when a young man joins the crowded household. Nini is a great reader, smart and sensitive, who is training to be a lathe-turner; his connection to the family is unclear. But he adores city life, his pockets are full of books and newspapers, and he seems to stand for something large and good—the nourishment, say, of a culture. He falls in love with Delia, but Delia, confused by his attention, flees into the arms of a man who treats her less well but interests her more. Consequences ensue, a veritable avalanche of them, and Delia comes into adulthood burdened by a worse-than-useless wisdom that only prompts regret.

To be stuck at home and silenced within it: Ginzburg knew this terrain intimately, as the details of her biography attest. Born in 1916, she grew up in clamor. Her father was a sharply opinionated professor of neuroanatomy, and her mother poured stories into every available ear. So much talk surrounded her, Ginzburg once said, that she had no choice but to develop a direct style, so she could say her piece before being interrupted. In 1938 she married Leone Ginzburg, who soon ran afoul of Mussolini and his thugs. The family was exiled to remote Pizzoli, in the Abruzzo, a place of rocky slopes dotted with sheep chased by large, lolloping white dogs. Exile was difficult, but worse was to come, for Leone was captured and murdered in a Roman prison in 1943. In a famous essay, “Winter in the Abruzzi,” Ginzburg reflected ruefully on the relative peace and contentment of the exile, which she could only fully appreciate in retrospect: “Dreams never come true, and … the instant they are shattered we are sick with longing for the days when they flamed within us.”  

As this passage suggests, Ginzburg is fascinated by the blinding force of dreams which, by distracting us from present discomforts, also take us away from reality. Nini cannot declare himself outright to Delia, and Delia cannot bring herself to leap fully into a relationship with him. Instead they dance around each other and pursue awful alternatives, transforming those closest to them into canvases on which to splash their ugliness. Ginzburg’s characters like to threaten each other: “I’ll smash your face.” But they only say this when they’re deeply involved. With this refrain, Ginzburg seems to ask: Why are people so often tempted to blacken the eyes of those they love? When what is most desired is within reach, why does the outreach follow the arc of a fist? 

Ginsburg’s view of family is so unsentimental, it’s visionary. Ginzburg understands how hard it is to come to terms with family because its lessons are so formative; even when her characters do leave home, they’re gripped by profound needs that went unmet in that first environment. At a particularly low point, Delia finds herself trapped in a courtyard where all she can do is walk in circles, out and back. This, Ginzburg warns, is where the road to the city can lead if, like Delia, you follow it blindly, missing the happiness that’s right in front of you. The Road may be a small story about a small place, but Ginzburg’s clarity lends grandeur to Delia’s plight. For all her ordinariness, Delia is as brightly legible as a comet—blink and you’ll miss her. Don’t miss her.

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Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) was an Italian author of novels, short stories, plays, and essays, for which she received the Strega Prize and Bagutta Prize; an acclaimed Italian translator of Proust and Flaubert; a Jewish writer who, because of anti-Semitic laws, sometimes could not publish under her own name; a principal editor at Einaudi, the prestigious Italian publishing house; and a mother of five who, late in her life, was elected to the Italian parliament where she served with distinction for several years. In her writing she explored family relationships, politics during and after the Fascist years and World War II, and philosophy. Modest and intensely reserved, Ginzburg was celebrated for her confrontations with the traumas of history, whether writing about the Turin of her childhood, the Abruzzi countryside, or contemporary Rome—all the while approaching those traumas only indirectly, through the mundane details and catastrophes of personal life. 

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The author of The Sun at Midday and Diary of a Djinn, Gini Alhadeff won the 2018 Florio Prize for her translation of Fleur Jaeggy’s I Am the Brother of XX.

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Diane Josefowicz is the author, most recently, of a novel, Ready, Set, Oh, published by Flexible Press; and, with Jed Z. Buchwald, of The Riddle of the Rosetta: How an English Polymath and a French Polyglot Discovered the Meaning of Egyptian Hieroglyphs, published by Princeton University Press. Her short novel. L’Air du Temps (1985) will be published next year by Regal House. Since 2020, she has served as reviews editor at Necessary Fiction. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with her family.