Dante Troisi
Dante Troisi was an influential Italian novelist and jurist, born on April 21, 1920, in the village of Tufo, southern Italy. His life spanned significant historical events, including the rise of Fascism and World War II, during which he served in the army and became a prisoner of war in Texas. After returning to Italy in 1947, he embarked on a judicial career, which greatly informed his literary work. Troisi’s writing is characterized by a deep engagement with philosophical concepts rather than traditional character-driven narratives, often reflecting the challenges and disillusionments faced by southern Italians in the postwar period. His notable works, such as "Diario di un giudice" and "L'odore dei cattolici," tackle complex themes like moral authority, political alienation, and the consequences of personal choices against a backdrop of societal turmoil. Troisi's last novel, "La sera del concerto," written during his battle with cancer, serves as a poignant exploration of mortality and artistic longing. He passed away on January 2, 1989, leaving behind a legacy as a critical voice in postwar Italian literature, known for his profound explorations of human dignity amid existential crises.
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Subject Terms
Dante Troisi
Writer
- Born: April 21, 1920
- Birthplace: Tufo, Italy
- Died: January 2, 1989
- Place of death: Rome, Italy
Biography
Dante Troisi was born on April 21, 1920, in Tufo, a village in southern Italy. Amid the upheavals attending the rise of Fascism, Troisi went to public school in Avellino and received a law degree from the newly opened University of Bari. Drafted into the army, he served in the African campaigns before being captured in the spring of 1943 and spending the remainder of World War II as a prisoner of war in an army facility outside Heredford, Texas. He was returned to Italy in 1947, where he began a long judicial career, initially as an appellate judge and ultimately as district magistrate in Rome.
Early on, Troisi saw fiction writing as a part of his judicial sensibility. In his novels, he was less concerned about characters and plot, focusing instead on ideas and on testing, often with pessimistic results, the political, social, and economic alternatives facing the generation of southern Italians who were raised with the promise of Benito Mussolini’s rise and then devastated by World War II. His first novel, L’ulivo nella sabbia, for example, centers on the dialectic between an upstanding judge and a Communist defendant arrested in postwar Italy for trafficking in weapons. In Innocente delitto, a young political activist kills a police officer during a strike, and as his trial unfolds he weighs the political decisions he has made, each centered on the troubling distance he feels from his father, Troisi’s representative of the generation that had embraced Mussolini.
Troisi’s signature work is Diario di un giudice (1962), comprised of fictional cases drawn from his judicial experience that examine the motivations behind the rampant violent criminal activity in postwar Italy. The novel is controlled by the moral authority of the judge, who is overworked, tired of lawyers, and disturbed by the manifest ineffectiveness of the massive judiciary bureaucracy. L’odore dei cattolici (1963) takes a similarly fatalistic view of the Catholic Church. The novel tells the story of a man from a provincial town who elects to leave the priesthood; he marries and starts a family, only to endure resentment from conservative neighbors (and ultimately his own wife) who cannot fathom the existential dilemma that caused him to abandon the priesthood.
Over the next fifteen years, Troisi continued to publish similarly philosophical novels that probed the implications of dilemmas in which his characters struggle with the responsibility of intelligent inquiry, rejecting the stubborn complacency of his generation and confronting, without simplistic resolutions, questions about the political, religious, and economic definition of contemporary Italy. Only in his last work, La sera del concerto, did Troisi abandon his compelling interest in larger cultural questions. Published posthumously in 1991 and written during his two-year struggle with cancer, this novel told of an aging writer who imagines a concert where he is entranced by a woman he does not know, a poignant allegory for his own approaching death. After he died on January 2, 1989, Troisi was hailed as a defining voice in postwar Italian fiction who fearlessly explored the anxieties of his generation, struggling to bear witness to contemporary events and still affirm the fundamental dignity of the human experience.