Elio Vittorini

Elio Vittorini was an Italian writer, publicist and translator. He came into the world in 1908 in Syracuse, in southeastern Sicily. In 1924, at the age of 16, he left his homeland and in 1927 married the sister of Salvatore Quasimodo, a poet and Nobel Prize winner for literature who was also from Sicily. In 1941 his novel Conversation in Sicily was published and established his worldwide fame. The poet is considered an authoritative representative of literary neorealism. While working for the publishing house Einaudi (from 1951), Vittorini rejected author Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel Il Gattopardo “as an untimely historical work without socio-critical relevance.” Vittorini died in Milan on Feb. 12, 1966, at the age of only 57.