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Natalia Levi was born in Palermo on 14 July 1916 into a Jewish family. Her father, Giuseppe Levi, was a scientist from Trieste and a staunch anti-fascist, which led to his imprisonment along with Natalia’s brothers. The family moved to Turin when Natalia was still a child. At school, she was marginalized for being Jewish and the daughter of an anti-fascist, finding solace in writing from an early age. In the early 1930s, her first short stories were published in the magazine Solaria. In 1938, she married Leone Ginzburg, an Italian intellectual of Jewish descent and Russian origins, adopting his surname for her literary work. Through him, she connected with Turin’s anti-fascist intellectual circles, particularly around the Einaudi publishing house, where Leone collaborated. With the outbreak of World War II, Natalia and her family were exiled to Abruzzo in 1940 for racial and political reasons. Despite the hardship, she published her first novel, La strada che va in città (The Road to the City), in 1942, initially under a pseudonym and later, in 1945, under her real name. In 1944, Leone Ginzburg was tortured and killed by fascists in Rome’s Regina Coeli prison. After the city’s liberation, Natalia moved to Rome and worked with Einaudi’s local office before returning permanently to Turin in 1945 to reunite with her children. In 1950, she married Gabriele Baldini, a professor of English literature, marking the start of her most prolific literary period. She published Tutti i nostri ieri (All Our Yesterdays) in 1952 and won the prestigious Premio Strega in 1963 for Lessico famigliare (Family Lexicon). In the late 1960s, Natalia began contributing to the cultural pages of Corriere della Sera, becoming a significant figure in Italian cultural and literary life. In 1969, she became politically active, advocating for truth about the Piazza Fontana bombing and the suspicious death of the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli, aligning herself with the radical left. Natalia Ginzburg passed away in Rome on 7 October 1991. |
