29 July 2026

In Italy, everything is a family affair

The story of a troubled family reflects the political and social tensions of modern Italy

Photo by David Hornback/Millennium Images, UK

In Italy, family is reckoned to be everything. You might say the Mafia is a grotesque parody of Italian family life. Food comes into it. A Cosa Nostra clan is often referred to as a cosca, after the Sicilian dialect for “artichoke”: families are as tightly bound to each other as an artichoke’s overlapping leaves. For rival clans, there is strength in numbers, so families had better be big. In 1988, in the old Mafia town of Giarre, I met the largest known family in Sicily. A non-Mafia clan, it consisted of ten males and ten females. The 50-year-old mother had been pregnant for 180 months of her life, and was worshipped locally as a sort of biological miracle. Unlike the Cosa Nostra, she gave the label “made in Italy” a good name.

Andrea Bajani, one of Italy’s brightest literary stars, has written a novel that scorns the family as an institution and all who defend it. The Anniversary, a bestseller in Italy, is narrated by a middle-aged Italian who has abandoned his parents in disgust. His father, a violent, inadequate man, runs the domestic life of the “ill-fated family” like a dictator, routinely beating his wife and wishing cancer on her best friends. (“He wanted her to be nothing so that he could be something,” we are told.) Unsurprisingly, the narrator has chosen not to see his parents in a decade. “They’ve been the best ten years of my life,” he lets on.

A novel that questions the sanctity of family life has a special frisson to Italians. The Anniversary not only won the coveted Strega Prize in 2025, Italy’s equivalent of the Booker, but it has also been translated into 30 languages. Bajani, 50, combines description of domestic terror with socio-historical reflections on family blood feuds and Mafia-style patriarchies. The prose is smoothly readable if at times strenuously literary (“Rummaging through the accordion files of my mind…”). The narrator and his sister had lived in daily terror of a man who tried to make his children in his own image, “burning our retinas with the blowtorch of his own self-proclaimed victimhood” (the original Italian is not much better). If their father represents uncontrolled authority in the hands of an absolutist, their mother is a picture of frightened servility.

The family live in a small town in northern Italy’s Piedmont region, not far from Turin. The mother works as a supermarket cashier; the father used to be a luggage salesman. They came of age in 1980s Italy, at a time of unrestrained “family-based capitalism”, when entrepreneurial nous was seen as a virtue, says Bajani, and Italy surpassed the UK to become the fifth industrial power outside East Asia. (Italians speak proudly of il sorpasso, “the overtaking”.) The Italian economy was powered by a host of family-run firms such as the Piedmont-based Ferrero, famous for its Kinder and fake-posh Ferrero Rocher chocolates.

Beneath the roseate flush of Italy’s prosperity, though, all was not well. The far-left Red Brigades resembled the Mafia in their attempts to inculcate a hatred of state authority and hunt down and kill police informers. In 1978, Bajani reminds us, they kidnapped and summarily executed the former Christian Democrat prime minister Aldo Moro. The murder and its aftermath shadow The Anniversary. “We lived in the eye of a storm that would rage for years,” the narrator says of the post-Moro period, when crypto-fascists connived with Italian secret service chiefs in a “strategy of tension” (Bajani uses a term familiar to all Italians) to implicate leftists in acts of terrorism. The intention was to create a climate of such instability that Italians would clamour for an authoritarian leader. They almost got him in the shape of Silvio Berlusconi, who used his television channels to spread propaganda and build a “videocracy” such as the world had never seen.

Bajani belongs to a generation of Italian authors who rose to prominence in the late 1990s and 2000s as part of the so-called giovani cannibali – young cannibals – literary movement which drew variously on kung-fu videos, comics and B-movie schlock to conjure a disaffected modern Italy. Niccolò Ammaniti’s novel I’m Not Scared and Simona Vinci’s A Game We Play (about underage sex) were superlative examples of the genre. Bajani has a milder temperament, and does not set out to shock, but the cinematic, horror-dazed images of The Anniversary linger in the mind.

The Anniversary Andrea Bajani, trs Geoffrey Brock
Penguin Classics
144pp, £12.99