A short life of the author
Ignazio Silone (born Secondino Tranquilli, 1 May 1900 – 22 August 1978) was an Italian novelist, essayist, and political figure whose fiction about the impoverished peasants of the Abruzzi mountains was among the most powerful anti-Fascist literature produced in Europe during the 1930s and who became, in exile, one of the most celebrated Italian writers in the world — better known abroad, during the Fascist period, than any Italian writer except perhaps Pirandello. His reputation has since been complicated by the revelation, after his death, that he served as an informer for the Italian Fascist secret police (OVRA) during the very years when he was publicly denouncing Fascism and building his career as its literary opponent.
Early Life and Communism
Silone was born in Pescina, a small town in the Abruzzi region of central Italy, into a peasant family. His mother and several siblings were killed in the devastating Avezzano earthquake of 1915 — a trauma that pervades his fiction. He became politically active as a teenager, joined the Italian Socialist Party, and was a co-founder of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) at the Congress of Livorno in 1921. He worked as a Communist organiser and journalist through the 1920s, travelling to Moscow, Berlin, and Spain.
In 1930, Silone broke with the Communist Party — disillusioned, he later wrote, by its authoritarianism, its subordination to Moscow, and its betrayal of the workers and peasants it claimed to represent. His essay “Emergency Exit” (Uscita di sicurezza, 1965), which describes his disillusionment, is one of the finest accounts of leaving the Communist movement, comparable to Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and the essays in The God That Failed.
Fontamara (1933)
Written in exile in Switzerland, Silone’s first novel tells the story of a village of desperately poor peasants in the Abruzzi who are systematically cheated, exploited, and brutalized by the Fascist authorities and the local landowners. The narrative is told by three peasant narrators whose simplicity and bewilderment in the face of injustice are simultaneously comic and devastating. The novel’s final question — “Che fare?” (“What is to be done?”) — echoes Lenin but is asked with a genuine anguish that transcends political sloganeering.
Fontamara was translated into twenty-seven languages and made Silone internationally famous. It could not be published in Italy until after the fall of Fascism.
Bread and Wine (1936)
Silone’s finest novel follows Pietro Spina, a Communist revolutionary who returns secretly to Fascist Italy disguised as a priest and discovers that the peasants he wants to liberate are more concerned with survival than with revolution, and that the Church he despises may contain more genuine compassion than the Party he serves. The novel’s great achievement is its refusal to simplify: Spina’s revolutionary idealism, the peasants’ fatalism, the Church’s mixture of corruption and consolation, and the Fascist state’s casual brutality are all rendered with equal honesty.
Silone revised the novel extensively in 1955 (published as Vino e pane), and the revised version is generally considered superior. Both versions are masterpieces of political fiction.
Later Novels
The Seed Beneath the Snow (1942) continues the story of Pietro Spina. A Handful of Blackberries (1952) and The Secret of Luca (1956) are quieter, more contemplative works about moral choice and community. The Fox and the Camellias (1960) is a Cold War novel. All are set in the Abruzzi, and all are concerned with the tension between individual conscience and collective ideology.
The OVRA Revelation
In 1996, historians working in Italian archives discovered documents indicating that Silone had served as an informer for OVRA (the Fascist secret police) in the late 1920s and possibly into the early 1930s — providing information about Communist Party activities and personnel. The revelations were explosive. Silone’s defenders argued that the documents might have been fabricated, that his informing was limited and reluctant, or that he was acting as a double agent. His critics argued that he had betrayed his comrades while publicly posing as a hero of the anti-Fascist resistance.
The debate has not been resolved, and Silone’s reputation in Italy remains deeply contested. Outside Italy, he is still read primarily as the author of Fontamara and Bread and Wine, and the OVRA controversy, while troubling, has not destroyed the literary value of his novels.
Collecting Silone
Fontamara (1933, German-language first edition published in Zurich) is the rarest and most desirable Silone title. The first Italian edition (1945, post-liberation) is also sought. English translations by various publishers are affordable. Bread and Wine (1937, Harper) in first American edition is collectible.