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Cialente Fausta: Un inverno freddissimo A Very Cold Winter)
The winter of 1947 was notoriously harsh all across Europe. It was made worse as Europe had not nearly recovered from the war. In Milan where this novel is set, the city had been bombed by the Allies and then deliberately destroyed by the retreating Germans.
This novel tell the story of an extended family living in a building in Milan.
The matriarch of the family is Camila.She was, indeed, probably still is married. Before the war, her husband, Dario, her husband ran off to France. He wrote to her and sent her money to look after the children but when the war broke out, he disappeared and has not been heard of since.
Camila is left with three children.Her daughter Alba is ambitious to escape the poverty of her family and is good looking and would like to be able to dress well and use expensive make-up. Camila has another daughter, Lalla, and a sonGuido. Also living with them isArrigo, her nephew. He is an orchestral violinist and sees himself somewhat aloof rom the rest of the family. He is married to Milena.,originally from Paris, who does not get on well with the rest of the family. Arrigo had, a brother.Nicola, who had been a resistance fighter in the war and was killed during the war. He was married to to Regina and she has a baby, Nicoletta and they are living with the family.
Other characters make an appearance in particular Enzo. He lives in the building and is quite friendly with.Camila. Like.Dario his wife left him and he has no idea where she is.Matelda is a longtime friend of Camila. Her marriage is not particularly happy, but her husband is very well off which is certainly compensation, not at least because they managed to spend the war in South Africa.
The main focus is on Camila. She struggles to be mother to her own children and to the others. Perhaps not surprisingly, the two men in her family, her son Guido and her nephew Arrigo, seem to play more marginal roles in the storyGuido wants to be an actor, which is looked down on by one or two peopleArrigo wants to be a concert violinist but has to earn his money traipsing all over the city giving violin lessons. He doesn’t really help his cause by trying to be a sticker for the right way of playing chamber of music and telling his conductor so.
Lalla wants to be a writer and she takes a story to a well-known male writer to ask his view. That doesn’t turn out too well either.
Alba wants a life of ease and comfort.She can’t stand hardship, their “pathetic existence,” as she called it,. ,She has made acquaintance at work with a woman who is now quit the job but keeps in touch with her and seems to be doing very very well financially getting a nice flat and is planning on buying a car. We, and eventually.Alba, realise the source of her income. Alba decides to run off to Rome and sends her mother a letter to that affect when her mother is away dealing with the estate of her mother who has just died.Camila is naturally not happy and perhaps not surprisingly, things do not go well for Alba.
As for Camila, we learn about what happened to her in the war after Dario left. She helped an American airman escape and she seems close to Enzo. She did not get on well with her mother, who lives in the country, but goes and looks after her when she is dying and even gets close to a neighbour tof her mother, Rosso, so called because of his red hair, but all that is interrupted with the disappearance of Alba.
And then there isRegina who is left without her husband and is considered by her parents almost as a wicked woman and is now with this other family, but she too is not going to take it all lying down.
And then the eponymous winter suddenly strikes them with a heavy snowfall. It is bitterly cold, wood is expensive and of poor quality. The boiler fails and they have other technical problems to deal with. It is during this period when Camila’s mother is ill and she has to leave. It does have the advantage in some cases bringing them close together, though certainly not in all cases.
A lot happens in the winter as people come and go, new relationships are forged,Camila’s mother dies, inevitably, the heating system has problems. There is a lot of snow but eventually it all ends and spring arrives and their lives have been somewhat disrupted but they now carry on and adapt what is very much a a new situation.
In her excellent introduction to this bookClaudia Durastanti, herself a well-known writer, refers to the various other Italian authors writing after the war. There were a few famous women writers at the time, but Cialente did not get the same acclaim which she really should have . Though , some of her books have been translated into English. it has taken 60 years for this one to be translated. It has been well worth the wait as this really is a very fine novel about an extended family shortly after World War II.
A few years ago, when I was in Trieste I visited the James Joyce c Centre and spoke to a a guide about writing in Trieste. He referred to the obvious writers such as Joyce ,Svevo and Umberto Saba but when I mentioned Cialente , he was surprised because though he had heard of her he did not think of her as one of the foremost writers of the city. I must say I disagreed with him then and I do now.
Publishing history
First published in 1966by Feltrinelli
First English translation in 2026 by Transit Books
Translated by Julia Nelsen