La storia di Elsa Morante e la sua attualità, a cinquant’anni dalla pubblicazione

On the 50th anniversary of Elsa Morante’s La Storia (1974-2024), the novel continues to captivate our collective imaginary with its striking timeliness. This stems primarily from its portrayal of human experiences that are both ordinary and extreme, concrete and intense—a form of traumatic realism.1 In light of a global geopolitical context increasingly threatened by conflicts, radical tensions, and apocalyptic sentiments related to ecological disasters and pandemics, La Storia‘s narrative and thematic power resonates with a new contemporary urgency. In fact, the novel strikes a chord not only due to its unique interweaving of micro and macrohistory, of subaltern destinies and reportages on the major events of the 20th century, but also through its engaging and multi-layered storytelling which superimposes a surface realism onto a traumatic dimension that resides in its oneiric abysses, images, and subterranean spaces.