Le Conformiste

Alberto Moravia, pseudonym of Alberto Pincherle, was born in Rome in 1907 into a prosperous middle-class family. As a child, he contracted bone tuberculosis, spending a total of five years in sanatoriums and at home, between the ages of 9 and 17. Perhaps this isolation, which fostered a voracious appetite for reading, explains the writer's precocious literary talent. He contributed to newspapers at a very young age, and at 22 he published his first novel— The Indifferent Ones — which had a great impact on the Italian literary atmosphere of the time. The markedly anti-fascist and anti-bourgeois slant of the work contributed to this, in the context of an Italy that had just witnessed the signing of the concordat between Benito Mussolini and the Vatican. Moreover, Moravia's works were quickly banned by the dictatorial regime and placed on the Vatican's Index of Prohibited Books for offending moral values ​​and good customs. Coming from a Jewish family and a left-wing activist, he lived in the United States during World War II. In 1941 he married Elsa Morante, also a writer, and the marriage lasted for almost twenty years. He returned to Italy after the conflict and resumed his activism, while his prestige abroad increased and several of his works were adapted for film by great filmmakers, such as Bernardo Bertolucci (The Conformist) and Jean-Luc Godard (DisdainFrom the 1960s onwards, he spent a good part of his life traveling, which resulted in, among other publications, An Idea from India (India ink, 2008) and Letters from the SaharaAlbert Moravia died in Rome in 1990.