Something was in the air in Italy during the first three decades of the 20th century, as if Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto opened floodgates to new revolutionary modes of thinking. The writing was on the wall, the 19th century was left behind, and the future was fast and revolutionary. This ferment was a fascinating double-edged sword: on the one hand, it produced incredible works of architecture, literature and art. On the other, it gave us fascism, one of the most brutal forms of government ever invented by man. As left-wing intellectuals transformed into fascist thinkers, the debates were largely happening in the country’s literary magazines and Florence found itself at the epicenter of this scene.
An early example was La Voce, founded in 1908 by Giuseppe Prezzolini, a weekly cultural magazine that was anti-conformist and hypercritical of the Italian bourgeoisie, and became a petri dish for proto-fascist political thought, with Benito Mussolini himself being a regular contributor. La Voce ceased publication in 1916, but not before influencing seminal German avant-garde magazine Der Sturm and the magazine that is the subject of this article, the revolutionary Florentine literary publication Solaria.
Solaria was founded in Florence in 1926 by a 22-year-old writer and intellectual called Alberto Carocci, with a similarly young group of like-minded individuals that included the 30-year-old Eugenio Montale, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize, and 17-year-old Leone Ginzburg, future husband to Family Sayings writer Natalia Ginzburg (née Levi). The city at the time was a hub of cultural activity, attractive to an array of artists, writers and thinkers from across Italy and Europe. Paola Gadda notes how Florence’s provincial reputation and its position, away from hubs of autarkic control, such as Rome and Milan, allowed intellectuals there to move more freely, avoiding direct confrontation with power. She quotes Montale: “The city appeared to me rather provincial, dimly lit in the evening. Then I discovered that it was not provincial at all.”
Solaria was envisioned as a space for innovation, a platform for emerging voices and ideas. The name was inspired by The City of the Sun by the Dominican philosopher Tommaso Campanella, a work that describes a utopian city, combining the Italian words for sun and air (sole and aria), evoking clarity and enlightenment. From its inception it positioned itself as an antidote to the literary stagnation of its time, aiming to challenge the dominance of traditionalist and nationalist literature, which had been heavily influenced by the political climate under Mussolini’s Fascist regime. While it was not overtly political, it promoted intellectual independence and a cosmopolitan outlook, fostering dialogue with transnationalist European modernist movements.
The magazine’s contributors included some of the most important Italian writers and intellectuals of the 20th century, such as Carlo Emilio Gadda (who would go on to write That Awful Mess on Via Merularana), and Elio Vittorini, besides the aforementioned Montale, who published early poems in Solaria that reflected his hermetic style—dense, symbolic and richly evocative. Gadda’s contributions, marked by their linguistic inventiveness and psychological depth, exemplified the magazine’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of literary form, while Vittorini used the publication as a springboard to explore themes of individual freedom and social responsibility, which would later define his oeuvre.
Solaria was also responsible for introducing Italian readers to a number of prominent modernist writers from abroad, such as James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Marcel Proust (another one of the founders, Giacomo Debenedetti, was one of the first to recognize the French writer’s genius), Franz Kafka, T.S. Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke and Thomas Mann. By publishing translations and critical essays on these authors, a sense of connection was fostered between Italian literature and broader international trends, breaking the insularity of Italian cultural life and situating it in a larger global context.
While this intellectual vibrancy was a strength, it was also a source of controversy, with Solaria frequently finding itself at odds with the Fascist regime, which viewed its emphasis on individual expression and cosmopolitanism with suspicion. Although the magazine avoided overt political statements, its commitment to intellectual freedom and artistic innovation was inherently subversive in a context where conformity and nationalism were heavily promoted. Issue 2 from 1934 contained The General’s Daughters by Enrico Terracini and The Red Carnation by Elio Vittorini, two works which were deemed offensive by Fascist authorities who seized the issue. (It was eventually published two years later in 1936.) But these political pressures reflected a difficult climate of censorship and ideological control, and in the meantime Solaria had ceased to exist.
Solaria’s writers went on to shape the postwar literary landscape, largely influencing the Neorealist movement, which shared Solaria’s commitment to exploring the complexities of modern life and giving voices to the marginalized. It comprised some of the best-known Italian writers, such as Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante, her lover Alberto Moravia, Cesare Pavese, Leonardo Sciascia, Primo Levi, Beppe Fenoglio and Solaria contributor Elio Vittorini. Despite its short lifespan, Solaria promoted literature as a space for innovation and exploration, even in the face of political and cultural constraints.
