During the Fascist Regime of 1922-1943, Fascism was widely represented in Italian literature. Authors such as Ignazio Silone used literature as a tool to promote the anti-fascist movement and his first novel Fontamara, for which he is still best known, is no exception. Silone's novels had the purpose of arousing the reader from the lethargy induced by fascist propaganda to a critical awareness of conditions around him. Giorgio Bassani's way of writing, some thirty years later, was very different and more complicated. Bassani's novel about the Jewish Finzi-Contini family is a reconstruction of a now vanished world through the narrator's memory. It familiarises the reader with the environment and the characters using very detailed descriptions of their lives and how Fascism effected them. There is a sense of time in Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini and the reader is a witness to the gradual change but substantial erosion of what makes the Jews of Ferrara citizens. Fontamara is written in a much less detailed way and keeps strictly to the anti-Fascist message with a very bitter attitude to those that he sees as evil. The two novels are very different from each other in location, time and social class, but they both have traits of the individual and collective within their storylines. In the first chapter the words solitudine, isolamento and separazione are used to describe the Finzi-Contini. Similarly in the opening of Fontamara the reader finds out that:.
".a Fontamara non vi sono due famiglie che non siano parenti.tutte le famiglie hanno interessi da spartire tra di loro".
There is a definite feel of community and therefore the collective.
Italy was deeply divided after World War I and due to this lack of unification amongst Italians, less than four years later Mussolini, the Fascist leader, was Prime Minister. Post-war Italy did not have a stable political framework and lacked national identity and this allowed fascism to rise.
