Giacomo Noventa is the pseudonym that Giacomo Ca'Zorzi, scion of an aristocratic Venetian family, chose out of modesty or perhaps unwillingness to flaunt his patrician heritage. He began to use it with his first publication, an article in the Florentine magazine Solaria (May-June 1934), "A proposito di un traduttore di Heine" (About One of [Heinrich] Heine's Translators). His family, patrician landowners, including his parents--Antonio and Emilia Ceresa Ca'Zorci--had noble roots in the small village of Noventa di Piave, Italy, where he was born and where the large paternal villa was located, in the flatland crossed by the Piave River. He received a Catholic, patrician education, of which he was always proud and from which he was able to derive his moral values: a code of friendship and honor that was the natural inheritance of his aristocratic background. His life was an uninterrupted succession of various tensions, inspired by idealistic...