The best Italian novels of the 20th century
The top 3 according to 6 votes from people: The Leopard · The Late Mattia Pascal · The Tartar Steppe. (Updated Feb 19, 2026.)
The 20th-century Italian novels that appear in every list by critics, booksellers and readers: from Pirandello and Svevo to Calvino, Morante and Eco.
Automatically translated (original in Italiano). See the original
Top 20
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1
The Leopard
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'.
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2
The Late Mattia Pascal
Luigi Pirandello, 1904. A man believed dead tries to live another life.
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3
The Tartar Steppe
Dino Buzzati, 1940. Lieutenant Drogo waits all his life for an enemy who never comes.
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4
Arturo's Island
Elsa Morante, 1957. Arturo's childhood and adolescence on Procida; Strega Prize.
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5
If This Is a Man
Primo Levi, 1947. The testimony of Auschwitz.
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6
Zeno's Conscience
Italo Svevo, 1923. The memoirs of an inept man from Trieste, written for his psychoanalyst.
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7
History
Elsa Morante, 1974. Ida and her son Useppe in wartime Rome.
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8
The Baron in the Trees
Italo Calvino, 1957. Cosimo climbs a tree at twelve and never comes down.
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9
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Italo Calvino, 1979. A novel about reading novels, with ten different beginnings.
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10
Johnny the Partisan
Beppe Fenoglio, 1968. The masterpiece of the partisan epic, published posthumously.
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11
Christ Stopped at Eboli
Carlo Levi, 1945. Internal exile in Lucania and the discovery of the peasant South.
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12
That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana
Carlo Emilio Gadda, 1957. A Roman crime story in baroque, dialect-rich prose.
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13
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Giorgio Bassani, 1962. A Jewish family in Ferrara on the eve of the racial laws.
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14
The Moon and the Bonfires
Cesare Pavese, 1950. Anguilla returns to the Langhe after America; Pavese's last novel.
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15
The Time of Indifference
Alberto Moravia, 1929. The moral apathy of a Roman bourgeois family; written at twenty.
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16
Family Lexicon
Natalia Ginzburg, 1963. The Levi family told through its catchphrases; Strega Prize.
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17
The Day of the Owl
Leonardo Sciascia, 1961. Captain Bellodi and the first great literary account of the Mafia.
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18
Acquainted with Grief
Carlo Emilio Gadda, 1963. A son, a mother and a villa in an imaginary South America that is really Brianza.
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19
One, No One and One Hundred Thousand
Luigi Pirandello, 1926. Vitangelo Moscarda discovers his nose tilts to the right and his identity collapses.
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20
Boys of life
First novel by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1955), about the children of the Roman suburbs in the post-war period.
Candidates
They don't make it into the top 20… yet. Vote for them to move them up.
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21
The Name of the Rose
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.
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Comments (5)
Il deserto dei Tartari è il libro della mia vita.
La coscienza di Zeno e l'ultima sigaretta, quanto ho riso.
Se questo è un uomo dovrebbe leggerlo chiunque.
Il Gattopardo primo, «se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi».
Manca Ragazzi di vita di Pasolini!