SOURCE: A review of More Roman Tales, in Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1965, pp. 294-96.

In the following excerpted review, Ragusa lauds the Romance tradition evident in Moravia's storytelling .

Moravia's Roman tales (Racconti romani, 1954; Nuovi racconti romani, 1959), together with the novel Two Women (La ciociara, 1957) and to some extent the earlier The Woman of Rome (La romana, 19"47), mark his turning from his favorite middle class setting to the Roman working classes and in some cases the Roman Lumpenproletariat. In a recent interview (Quaderni milanesi, II, Spring 1961), Moravia revealed that what he calls "the myth of the people" had begun to attract him as early as 1935, but that his first real contacts with "the people" occurred only during the German occupation, when he lived as an evacuee in the country outside Rome (setting of Two Women). His direct experience of the popular milieu at that time was bolstered by...