: Far from being a passive observer, he became a "free intellectual" under the influence of philosopher Benedetto Croce , eventually joining the anti-fascist resistance and serving time in prison in 1943. The Architect of Ferrara

: In 1938, Mussolini’s Racial Laws shattered his life. He was expelled from his tennis club and banned from the university, though he managed to graduate in secret.

After the war, Bassani moved to Rome but never truly left Ferrara. He spent decades writing and obsessively revising what he called , a collection of interconnected novels and stories that captured the life and eventual destruction of the city’s Jewish community.

His story is one of high culture meeting the harshest of political realities: