In this ground-breaking work, Ellen Nerenberg offers an analysis of the confinement experience in Italian narrative between 1930 and 1960, the last fifteen years of Fascism and the fifteen that followed. Nerenberg diverges from the notion that a radical break from Fascism coincided with Mussolini's fall, instead revealing a disturbing continuity of social restraints following World War II.

Drawing on critical discourses of architectural design, urban planning, and cultural geography, Nerenberg offers readings of Buzzati, Piovene, de Cespedes, Banti, Morante, Pratolini, and Gadda....