Fifty years after the publication of La Storia, Elsa Morante’s most controversial novel and bed, the debate on her literary legacy reopens outside Italy. On Tuesday 31 March 2026, at the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò of New York University, a meeting dedicated to the rediscovery of the author and the role of translations in the contemporary circulation of Italian literature, with a specific focus on writers.
The event, in English and structured as an academic panel, brings together scholars and translators working between the United States and Italy: Franco Baldasso (Bard College), Stefania Porcelli (Hunter College), Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee. The comparison takes inspiration from a new issue of the academic journal Annali d’Italianistica entirely dedicated to Morante, on the basis of the editorial interest for the new translations in English of his works published in recent years and which have contributed to making it accessible to a wider audience.
The figure of Morante is now also reinterpreted in the light of his influence on contemporary authors, including Elena Ferrante, who has repeatedly indicated the Roman writer as a central reference, until he builds his own pseudonym in homage to his imagination. In Italy, History remains one of the best-selling novels of the second 20th century – published in 1974 by Einaudi, with an initial print of about 600 thousand copies – and continues to be the subject of study in schools and universities. In the United States, however, its diffusion has long been limited by partial translations or out of the catalogue: the renewed editorial and academic interest signals a change of phase, in which the Italian literature of the twentieth century, and in particular that written by women, is reinterpreted as part of a larger and international canon.
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