It has taken twenty-six years for Elio Vittorini's central work [Women of Messina] to reach us in translation; years that have turned a tract for the post-war times into a document of historical interest, and have confirmed its predictions, justified its ironies, fulfilled at least some of its economic and social prophecies. Yet it keeps much of its power and even a certain glory. Its interest is now more aesthetic, less social, than it was in its early days; its qualities appear in its structure and nature as a novel rather than in its political message; its utopianism has been, if not silenced, at least softened with time, disappointment and clear-sightedness. Vittorini himself, when he died nine years ago, a luminous figure on the Italian literary scene rather than a great name outside it, had lost much of the ardour with which he first wrote it. Indeed, for...