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‘The Garden of the Finzi-Continis’ By Rhonda Nowak Jun 12, 2022 12:15 AM A A Garden ‘transcends literary imagination’ “The garden, or to be more precise, the vast park that surrounded the Finzi-Contini house before the war, and spread out almost 25 acres to the foot of the Mura Degli Angeli on one side … today no longer exists.” — Giorgio Bassani, “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” 1962 Last weekend, I endured tedious air travel that involved a second layover in Atlanta en route to Houston to attend a memorial service for my mother- and father-in-law, who, after 67 years of marriage, died less than 18 months apart. The long journey provided an opportunity for me to read the novel slated for June on my list of garden-related literature for 2022. It is a semiautobiography titled “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” by acclaimed Italian author Giorgio Bassani. The novel was adapted into a 1970 movie directed by Vittorio De Sica and won an Academy Award in 1972 for Best Foreign Language Film. In January this year, an operatic adaptation of the book premiered in New York City. Set in the northern Italian city of Ferrara just before the outbreak of World War II, Bassani’s historical novel follows the relationship between the narrator, a young, Jewish literary scholar — presumably Bassani — and Micol Finzi-Contini, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish aristocrat. Behind the walls of their sprawling estate, the proud Finzi-Continis insulate themselves from the middle-class members of their Jewish community until autumn 1938, after Mussolini’s regime published the “Manifesto of Fascist Racism.” The series of anti-Semitic laws that followed the manifesto prohibited marriages between Jews (and African races) and other Italian citizens of so-called Aryan descent. The racial laws also banned Jews from military service, universities and non-Jewish schools, public libraries, employment in banking, government and education, as well as professional and recreational clubs. Jewish residents even were prohibited from placing obituaries in newspapers and appearing in telephone directories. After their expulsion from the local tennis club, Micol and her brother, Alberto, invite the narrator and other friends to play tennis with them on their private court set in the garden. There, the young narrator falls obsessively in love with Micol, who leads him on for a while and then cruelly rejects him. The Finzi-Continis’ expansive walled garden is not just an important setting in the novel. It symbolizes the family’s sheltered perception that, despite the racial laws, their lives in Ferrara would go on “almost as before.” With each new indignity, the Finzi-Continis — indeed, most of the Italian Jewish community — were, Bassani writes, “incapable of evaluating the real significance of the present or of reading into the future.” Refusal to acknowledge their vulnerability allows the Finzi-Contini family to begin an expensive overhaul of their tennis courts during the final days of August 1939, just as Nazi Germany began its invasion of Poland, thus triggering World War II. Bassani tells us at the beginning of the book that all of the Finzi-Contini family, except Alberto who died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma the year before, were imprisoned in Italy in 1943 and then deported to a concentration camp in Germany where they were “swallowed up by German crematory ovens.” The novel and film inspired thousands of tourists to look for the fictional Finzi-Contini garden when they visited Ferrara. So much so, in fact, that Israeli sculptor Dani Karavan began an interpretive art project in the 1980s, aimed at bringing Bassani’s literary imagination to life, called “The Garden That Doesn’t Exist.” Karavan, who died in 2021, never completed the project, but a model and other pieces of his planned installation are exhibited at the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah in Ferrara. The museum is on the site of a former prison where Bassani was held briefly before Mussolini was ousted from power in 1943. Last year, a documentary film written by Karavan’s daughter, Noa Karavan-Cohen, was released. The film also is called “The Garden That Doesn’t Exist” and focuses on Bassani’s novel and De Sica’s film to explore how art influences people’s perceptions of the world. I would argue the garden of the Finzi-Continis, although never a tangible space, does exist in the imaginations of those who read the novel or watch the movie. After Micol Finzi-Contini rebuffs Bassani’s romantic overtures and banishes him from the garden in 1939, he travels to France where he happens upon some notes written by 19th-century French author Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name, Stendhal. Among Stendhal’s notes are four words: “All lost, nothing lost.” Bassani writes the words on a postcard and sends them to Micol, after which he finally feels “free, healed … and I could breathe.” I think for Bassani the words did not mean the love — the garden — had never existed, but that they did — and always would — exist in the bittersweet memories of his heart. I, too, have lost a love, a garden. I’ve written several times about the Shakespeare garden at Hanley Farm, so it’s with a heavy heart that I say I am no longer allowed to have the garden at the farm due to land use restrictions. The plants will be removed in the fall, and I’m confident the garden will have a new home where they will continue to pay tribute to the Bard as a historical horticultural project. “All lost, nothing lost.” Rhonda Nowak is a Rogue Valley gardener, teacher and writer. See literarygardener.com or email her at [email protected]