Vasco Pratolini

Vasco Pratolini (Florence, 1913 – Rome, 1991) was an Italian novelist who, together with Alberto Moravia, Italo Calvino, Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese, is counted among the founders of Italian neorealism. He wrote in Italian, and his books remain one of the most readable routes into the lives of working-class Florentines under Fascism and in the postwar years.

Born in Florence into a poor family, he lost his mother in 1918 while his father was at war, and was raised by his grandparents. At twelve he moved to Via del Corno, the street that later became the centre of one of his major novels. He worked as a street seller, in bars and as a typesetter, and was largely self-taught. His entry into literary life came through Elio Vittorini, with whom he worked on the newspaper Il Bargello. During a period of hospital treatment for tuberculosis between 1935 and 1937, he read widely, and the experience shaped the book Taccuino del Convalescente. In 1938 he co-founded with Alfonso Gatto the magazine Campo di Marte, which the Fascist government shut down nine months later.

During the German occupation he joined the Italian resistance, an experience he later recounted in a book set near the Ponte Milvio. After the war he worked as a journalist in Naples and, from 1951, in Rome, where he entered the world of cinema. He wrote more than twenty screenplays, including Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers and Roberto Rossellini's Paisan. Two of his novels were filmed by Valerio Zurlini. His fiction mixes autobiographical material with close portraits of humble neighbourhoods, especially in Florence, and his plain style suits the subjects he chooses. His legacy lies in the postwar Italian novel, which placed the everyday lives of ordinary people at its centre.