Ferrara, Time and Guilt in Giorgio Bassani’s The Heron

The article analyzes, in its first part, the image of Ferrara and the role of time in Bassani’s novels, with particular attention to the urban chronotope he crafted, where the history of the deportation of Ferrarese Jews intertwines with the city’s topography, establishing a division between the Ferrara of the saved and that of the submerged. The article then focuses on the autobiographical element, strongly implicated in Bassani’s narration, where everything is filtered through memory, which, while faithfully rendering the city’s history and geography, simultaneously transforms it into a “fantastic,” mental place. This is as required by authentic art, by the great tradition of the historical novel, which Bassani defended in a famous controversy against the Italian Neo-avant-garde (the Gruppo 63) and in his quieter critique of the French Nouveau Roman. In this context, the second part of the study offers a reading of The Heron, the fifth chapter of The Novel of Ferrara, perhaps the most mature fruit of Bassani’s narrative. The novel aligns with the themes of Francis Bacon’s Neo-Expressionist painting and its variant, the,Existential Realism of Alberto Sughi, discussed by Giuseppe Raimondi, one of Bassani’s mentors in art writing during his Bologna years. This is followed by a detailed account of the development of The Heron, with attention to the functioning of narrative time and, above all, to the theme of guilt and its redemption, linked to the story of the Ferrarese Jews and addressed repeatedly, in verse and prose, also by Primo Levi.