Città, periferia e provincia nella narrativa 'romana' di Alberto Moravia

The article focuses on the 'Roman' phase of Alberto Moravia's fiction (in particular La ciociara, i Racconti romani and i Nuovi racconti romani), examining the meaning that the dialectic city-urban suburbs and city-province assumes in it, which reflects the more general dialectic between center and periphery. The geographical connotation of these books, which explicitly puts 'Romanism' at the center right from the titles, risks relegating it to a local and restricted perspective, thus obscuring the presence of central themes and issues also in the rest of moravian production. This dialectic is also intertwined with the "proletarian myth", by which by his own admission the writer was influenced in the first postwar period, but which did not prevent him from turning a disenchanted gaze also on popular characters and their "moral world".