Alberto Moravia

He met novelist Elsa Morante in 1936 and married her in 1941. After their marriage, they lived in Capri. They separated in 1962 and thereafter he started living with writer Dacia Maraini.

In 1986, he married Carmen Llera. He dedicated his short story collection “The Thing and other stories” to Carmen.

At the age of 82, he was found dead in the bathroom of his Lungotevere apartment in Rome.

Coming from a wealthy middle class family of Via Sgambati in Rome, Moravia was the son of Carlo, an architect and painter and Teresa Iginia de Marsanich.

On account of suffering from tuberculosis of the bone, he was confined to bed for five years. Therefore, he could not finish conventional schooling. Instead, he spent three years at home and the remaining two years in a sanatorium.

He was a voracious reader; some of his favourite authors included Giosu� Carducci, Dostoevsky, Boccaccio, Joyce, Goldoni, Shakespeare, Ariosto, Moli�re, Gogol, Mallarm�. He was also well versed in French and studied English and German languages. He could write poems in both languages.

After leaving the sanatorium in 1925, he moved to Bressanone. In 1927, after meeting with Corrado Alvaro and Massimo Bontempelli, he started his journalism career with the magazine “900”.

Magazine “900” published several of his short stories like “The Tired Courtesan”, “Crime at the Tennis Club” and “The Curious Thief”. He published, “Time of Indifference”, his first novel in 1929.

In the year 1930, he collaborated with “La Stampa”, a newspaper. In 1933, along with Mario Pannunzio, he started the publication of literary review magazine “Characters” and “Today”.

In 1935, he went to the United States to deliver lectures on Italian literature. In the same year his reviews of “Le Ambizioni Sbagliate” faced a ban by the Fascist regime.

In 1937, his work “The Cheat” appeared. To avoid Fascist censorship, he discussed about surrealist and allegoric genres in it. After the Fascist seized the second edition of “La Mascherata” in 1941, he started writing under a pseudonym.

His first novel “Time of Indifference”, published in 1929, was his analytical view of the moral decadence of a middle-class mother and two of her children. Literary critics praised this novel by referring it as a remarkable example of contemporary Italian narrative fiction.

One of his most famous novels was “The Empty Canvas”. It is a story about the troubled physical relationship between a young, rich painter and an easygoing girl in Rome.