Much of 20th-century Italian literature has been dedicated to the business of remembering origins. With a sequence of stories, a volume or two of dialect poetry, or a childhood memoir, a writer stakes a claim to a territory, a city or a social milieu. the entire country, from the Alps to Sicily, can be mapped according to the local colour of poets, novelists and playwrights. The singular achievement of Giorgio Bassani, who died on April 13th, aged 84, was to transcend all the various backgrounds which reached out to claim him for their own.
He was a Jew, and the Jewish experience in dark times is a significant element in his fiction. Even so, he eludes classification as a Jewish writer. He was a Ferrarese, alert to the features, both physical and moral, of life in the small towns of the lower Po valley, the Bassa Padana. But his evocations of Ferrara, and its surrounding landscape, possess a quality of detachment and an absence of nostalgia. Above all, he was a novelist, poet and critic, whose presence within the literary world of post-war Italy was defined by his distance from it.
It was as a pianist, rather than as a writer, that Bassani seemed likely to shine during an uneventful childhood as the son of a prosperous doctor. In his final school years, however, he imbibed the anti-fascist ideas of a group of young teachers, and, as a student at Bologna, he encountered further challenges to the spirit of Mussolinian bourgeois orthodoxy in the classes given by the art historian Roberto Longhi and the critic Carlo Calcaterra.
Encouraged by Longhi, he began to publish articles in a local review, and in 1940 his first book, Una citta di pianura (A City of the Plain), was published under the pseudonym Giacomo Marchi, a disguise adopted in response to Mussolini's racial laws.
Giorgio Bassani's involvement in anti-fascist operations increased as the second World War began, and in 1943, on the eve of Italy's surrender to the Allies, he was briefly imprisoned as part of a round-up of dissidents. His marriage to Valeria Sinigallia took place soon afterwards, and the pair fled to Florence, where they lived, with the aid of forged passports, in two tiny rooms. He managed to rescue his parents, and his sister Jenny, from the advancing Germans; the rest of his Ferrarese relatives perished in Buchenwald.
Not until 1956, and the publication of Cinque storie ferraresi (Five Stories of Ferrara), did Giorgio Bassani's true voice make itself heard among a wider Italian public. The previous 10 years had seen him working as a schoolteacher, and witnessed his false start as a poet, but the most valuable experience came from writing for the cinema. He also played a number of small film roles, whose techniques had a clear influence on his treatment of fictional narrative.
Recognition of a notable new talent came in the form of the Strega Prize, Italy's major literary award, given to Cinque storie ferraresi.
The appearance of Gli occhiali d'oro (The Golden Glasses) in 1958 confirmed its author's promise, and when Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis) was published in 1962, his international status was guaranteed.
These works, together with their successors, Dietto la porta (Behind the Door, 1964) and the revised Ferrara stories, which appeared, with two earlier tales added, as L'odore del fieno (The Smell of Hay) in 1972, explained the world of the author's boyhood and youth against the background of official anti-semitism.
Both place and people are surrounded, in Georgio Bassani's treatment of them, by an abstract dimension relating to the late 20th-century crises of dislocation, solitude and personal anguish.
A last, full-length novel, L'airone (The Heron) was published in 1968.
Whether through pride - or simply because he had nothing left that he wished to say - Giorgio Bassani relinquished fiction, and more or less abandoned writing altogether in the wake of L'odore del fieno.
The gesture was typical of a man whose sense of his dignity was always so marked. A striking figure throughout his life - he had been a brilliant tennis player, and his powerfully blue eyes earned him the nickname "Celestino" - he was well suited to be vice-president of RAI (the Italian national broadcasting network) and president of Italia Nostra, the heritage organisation he founded.
In another incarnation, as a reader and editor for the publishing firm of Feltrinelli, he was instrumental in recovering the manuscript of one of the greatest Italian novels, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il gattopardo (The Leopard), which had been rejected in the 1950s as rightwing and old-fashioned.
Giorgio Bassani, who at the end suffered from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, was a quietly insistent chronicler of our age's various menaces to liberty.
He is survived by his wife Valeria, from whom he was separated, their two children and his long-time companion Portia Prebys.
Giorgio Bassani: born 1916; died April, 2000 99146687