A young working class woman abandoned by her bourgeois lover, the tensions of intermarriage between established classes and communities, a holocaust survivor seemingly back from the dead, a formidable socialist activist defying house arrest, and the only witness to the first local atrocity of the Second World War. Five unforgettable stories in which Bassani gave life to the characters that would inform his much loved sequence of Ferrara novels. Moving, poetic, atmospheric and artfully observed, this collection is a distillation of Bassani's genius. It won the Strega Prize on first publication as Cinque Storie Ferraresi in 1956, and established Bassani as one of the greatest Italian writers of the twentieth century.