# The best Italian novels of the 20th century

The 20th-century Italian novels that appear in every list by critics, booksellers and readers: from Pirandello and Svevo to Calvino, Morante and Eco.

- 6 votes · 21 items
- Oct 24, 2025 · Filippo De Luca
- https://even.best/en/l/432/the-best-italian-novels-of-the-20th-century

## Top 20

1. **The Leopard** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, 1958. The Prince of Salina and the end of a world: 'If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change'.
2. **The Late Mattia Pascal** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Luigi Pirandello, 1904. A man believed dead tries to live another life.
3. **The Tartar Steppe** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Dino Buzzati, 1940. Lieutenant Drogo waits all his life for an enemy who never comes.
4. **Arturo's Island** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Elsa Morante, 1957. Arturo's childhood and adolescence on Procida; Strega Prize.
5. **If This Is a Man** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Primo Levi, 1947. The testimony of Auschwitz.
6. **Zeno's Conscience** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Italo Svevo, 1923. The memoirs of an inept man from Trieste, written for his psychoanalyst.
7. **History** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Elsa Morante, 1974. Ida and her son Useppe in wartime Rome.
8. **The Baron in the Trees** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Italo Calvino, 1957. Cosimo climbs a tree at twelve and never comes down.
9. **If on a Winter's Night a Traveler** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Italo Calvino, 1979. A novel about reading novels, with ten different beginnings.
10. **Johnny the Partisan** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Beppe Fenoglio, 1968. The masterpiece of the partisan epic, published posthumously.
11. **Christ Stopped at Eboli** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Carlo Levi, 1945. Internal exile in Lucania and the discovery of the peasant South.
12. **That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Carlo Emilio Gadda, 1957. A Roman crime story in baroque, dialect-rich prose.
13. **The Garden of the Finzi-Continis** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Giorgio Bassani, 1962. A Jewish family in Ferrara on the eve of the racial laws.
14. **The Moon and the Bonfires** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Cesare Pavese, 1950. Anguilla returns to the Langhe after America; Pavese's last novel.
15. **The Time of Indifference** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Alberto Moravia, 1929. The moral apathy of a Roman bourgeois family; written at twenty.
16. **Family Lexicon** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Natalia Ginzburg, 1963. The Levi family told through its catchphrases; Strega Prize.
17. **The Day of the Owl** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Leonardo Sciascia, 1961. Captain Bellodi and the first great literary account of the Mafia.
18. **Acquainted with Grief** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Carlo Emilio Gadda, 1963. A son, a mother and a villa in an imaginary South America that is really Brianza.
19. **One, No One and One Hundred Thousand** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Luigi Pirandello, 1926. Vitangelo Moscarda discovers his nose tilts to the right and his identity collapses.
20. **Boys of life** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — First novel by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1955), about the children of the Roman suburbs in the post-war period.
21. **The Name of the Rose** (-1 · ▲0 ▼1) — Umberto Eco, 1980. William of Baskerville investigates murders in an abbey in 1327; over 50 million copies.

How is this ranking ordered? By people's votes: each ▲ adds a point and each ▼ takes one away. Anyone can vote and add what is missing.