The literary career of Marino Moretti spans about seventy-five years and, though his name is most frequently associated with Italian poetry of the first two decades of the twentieth century, he left a substantial body of prose, comprising some twenty novels, several volumes of short stories, memoirs, letters, and essays that fuse personal experience and keen observation of social customs. For such critics as Giuseppe Petronio, Moretti is an author who "è rimasto per tutta la vita 'un crepuscolare'" (remained faithful to "a crepuscular" poetics) (quoted from L'attività letteraria, 1979. The fourth of eight children, Moretti had two brothers, Libero and Olindo (the latter died at a young age in 1904), and five sisters, Luigia, Bice, Vittorina, Anna, and Ines. This biographical fact appears to have influenced to a large extent the selection of fictional characters for his novels. Indeed, the protagonists of many of the novels written by...