Alberto Moravia Biography

Alberto Moravia was one of the most important, and certainly the most prolific, of modern Italian authors. His keen moralistic approach focuses mainly on the iniquities of bourgeois society.

Alberto Moravia Age

He was born on November 28, 1907, in Rome, Italy. Birth sign not known. Died at the age of 82.

Alberto Moravia Nationality

He was an Italian by birth.

Alberto Moravia Education

Moravia did not finish conventional schooling because, at the age of nine, he contracted tuberculosis of the bone, which confined him to bed for five years. He spent three years at home and two in a sanatorium near Cortina d’Ampezzo, in north-eastern Italy. Moravia was an intelligent boy and devoted himself to reading books and some of his favorite authors. He learned French and German and wrote poems in French and Italian.

Alberto Moravia Photo

Alberto Moravia Family

He was born in Via Sgambati in Rome, Italy, to a wealthy middle-class family. His Jewish Venetian father, Carlo, was an architect and a painter. His Catholic Anconitan mother, Teresa Iginla de Marsanich, was of Dalmatian origin. Alberto family had interesting twists and developed a complex cultural and political character

The brothers Carlo and Nello Rosselli, founders of the anti-fascist resistance movement Giustizia e Libertà, murdered in France by Benito Mussolini’s order in 1937, were paternal cousins and his maternal uncle, Augusto De Marsanich, was an undersecretary in the National Fascist Party cabinet.

Alberto Moravia Marriage

He married the novelist Elsa Morante,  he lived on Capri with his wife, the novelist Elsa Morante. Since his relations with the Fascist regime had more and more deteriorated over the years, Moravia went into hiding after Mussolini’s return to power in July 1943, and he spent some nine months among peasants and shepherds near Fondy. After the war, they returned to Rome.

In 1986, at the age of 78, he caused a stir by marrying Carmen Llera, a 32-year-old Spanish advertising executive, two months after the death of his first wife, Elsa Morante, a prominent novelist in her own right. They had been separated for 24 years and had no children.

Alberto Moravia Career

The author of more than 20 novels, Mr. Moravia won an international audience through translations and film versions of many of them, notably “Woman of Rome,” starring Gina Lollobrigida as a Roman prostitute, and “Two Women” with Sophia Loren, who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of an Italian woman who is raped by Moroccan soldiers in World War II.

Mr. Moravia carved out a cultural and intellectual niche at the age of 21 with his first book, “The Time of Indifference,” which told of the decline of middle-class values in the early days of Italian fascism. His most prolific period was the 1940s and 1950s. In addition to “Woman of Rome” and “Two Women,” his novels of that time included “Disobedience,” “Conjugal Love,” “The Conformist,” “Ghost at Noon” and “Empty Canvas.”

When “Fancy Dress Party,” a novel about an elaborately uniformed dictator, appeared in 1941, fascist authorities suppressed it on the ground that it was a satire of Benito Mussolini. In 1952, the Vatican placed all of Mr. Moravia’s books on its Index of Forbidden Books on the ground that they were immoral.  The index was discontinued after the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s.

In his seventies, he became active in politics and was elected in 1984 to the European Parliament with the backing of Italy’s Communist Party. In 1986, at the age of 78, he caused a stir by marrying Carmen Llera, a 32-year-old Spanish advertising executive, two months after the death of his first wife, Elsa Morante, a prominent novelist in her own right. They had been separated for 24 years and had no children.

Themes and literary style

Moral aridity, the hypocrisy of contemporary life and the inability of people to find happiness in traditional ways such as love and marriage are the regnant themes in the works of Alberto Moravia. Usually, these conditions are pathologically typical of middle-class life; marriage is the target of works such as Disobedience and L’amore coniugale (Conjugal Love, 1949). Alienation is the theme in works such as Il disprezzo (Contempt or A Ghost at Noon. 1954) and La noia (The Empty Canvas) from the 1950s, despite observation from a rational-realistic perspective. Political themes are often present: an example is La Romana (The Woman of Rome, 1947), the story of a prostitute entangled with the Fascist regime and with a network of conspirators. The extreme sexual realism in La noia (The Empty Canvas, 1960) introduced the psychologically experimental works of the 1970s.

Moravia’s writing style was highly regarded for being extremely stark and unadorned, characterized by elementary, common words in an elaborate syntax. A complex mood is established by mixing a proposition constituting the description of a single psychological observation mixed with another such proposition. In the later novels, the inner monologue is prominent.

Alberto Moravia Net worth / Salary

His net worth was under review. Concerning his salary, the same thing under review.

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