Italian literature has produced several of the most important novels of the last two centuries, most of them still underread in the English-speaking world. The tradition includes writers working in very different registers — the vast historical fresco of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the cool formal precision of Italo Calvino, the fierce contemporary realism of Elena Ferrante — and the question of where to start depends on what kind of reading you want to do.
The single most important Italian novel of the 20th century is Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard, published posthumously in 1958. It follows Prince Fabrizio Corbera of Salina through the political upheaval of the Risorgimento — the unification of Italy in the 1860s — and captures, with melancholy precision, the experience of an aristocratic class watching its world end. The novel's famous line — "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change" — is not a cynical remark but a description of how power actually sustains itself through apparent transformation. The prose, in Archibald Colquhoun's translation, is rich and slow and worth every moment. It is the Italian equivalent of Tolstoy.
Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler is a different kind of novel entirely — a metafictional experiment in which the reader is the protagonist, and the book is about the experience of reading. Each chapter begins a different novel, but is interrupted before it can develop. Calvino was the most formally inventive of the major Italian writers, and this is his most playful and most representative work. For readers who like their fiction to think about itself — who enjoyed the labyrinthine structure of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov or the self-awareness of contemporary literary fiction — Calvino is the place to go. His Invisible Cities is shorter and more accessible, though it is less a novel than a series of imagined conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan about cities that may or may not exist.
Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels — beginning with My Brilliant Friend — are the most widely read Italian fiction of the last decade. The series follows two women, Elena and Lila, from childhood in a poor Naples neighbourhood through their divergent adult lives. Ferrante writes about female friendship, class aspiration, violence, and the city of Naples with an intensity that is unusual in literary fiction. The books are long — four volumes — but they have the narrative momentum of the best popular fiction and the interior density of the best literary fiction. For readers who want to invest in a world and stay in it, the Neapolitan novels are the obvious choice from the contemporary Italian tradition.
The byallo literary fiction shelf holds novels that share Italian literature's interest in the intersection of history and individual life — John Williams's Stoner, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day — and the narrative history shelf holds the kind of history writing that Italian literature draws on. Dava Sobel's Longitude and Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August are both models of the narrative history form that Italian historical fiction practices in a different register. All of these are useful context for reading the Italian novels described here.