cover image Last Act in Urbino

Last Act in Urbino

Paolo Volponi. Italica Press, $15 (320pp) ISBN 978-0-934977-33-3

Set in the late 1960s and steeped in Italian scenery, food and drink, this period drama is as stiff and stagy as any passion play. Volponi (1924-1994), who garnered international acclaim for his 1949 novel My Troubles Began, was one of Italy's literary luminaries, a two-time recipient of the Premio Strega book award. This is the first English translation of a 1975 work in which the author's hometown serves as the setting for national events. The characters are caricatures: The tyrannical remnant of local Renaissance royalty, Count Oddo Oddi-Semproni, and his sweet-natured whore, Dirce, are countered by the bandy-legged anarchist Professor Gaspare Subissoni and ``his woman,'' Vives, a tragically stoic Spanish revolutionary and the book's most resonant soul. All are set in motion by the television--a dour main character--when it broadcasts news of terrorist bombings in Milan. It's a Calvino-esque picture of modernity enthralled by technology, one that argues for decentralized government and personal freedom with an impressive eye for detail. Whether the pervasively obtuse syntax and strange language (a passage on Oddo's beard reads, ``The young man's down sparkled with satisfaction, dense like the subject of a Bronzino portrait'') are the faults of the translation or the original, there is something at odds between Volponi's powerfully incisive sensibility and the simple, at times silly, drama. (Mar.)