Encyclopedia

Abstract

Luigi Malerba, pen name of Luigi Bonardi (1927–2008), was a highly accomplished Italian writer who wrote numerous novels, short stories, children’s books, travel diaries, and screenplays for over forty years. During his long career, he regularly collaborated with La Stampa and other Italian newspa-pers.2 A native of Berceo, a small town in the Apennines near Parma, he moved to Rome to “look for more favorable climatic conditions.”3 In Rome, he started working as a television and movie screenwriter. At thirty-six, he published his first work: La scoperta dell’alfabeto (1963, The Discovery of the Alphabet). This was a collection of short stories narrating the hard life and toils of farmers in the Apennines. Faced with dire socioeconomic and linguistic challenges, these farmers grappled painfully with the end of their centuries-old civilization.