The novel

We have repeatedly argued for the lack of a purely Italian narrative, understood as a great wide-ranging romance tradition. This depends on the delay with which this genre has established itself with us, due to the slowness in the development of the middle class, that is “those citizens” (like those who speak to you) placed by luck between the idiot and the literate “(Foscolo) .
The novel has its impulse in the eighteenth century, in England first and in France later. In Italy, as in Germany or Spain, the middle class has not yet developed as a thinking and highly productive class, in a world still dominated by the aristocracy. The…