Welcome back to the Deep Dive. We are shifting
gears today. We usually tackle big concepts or
tech trends, but today we are opening the archives
on a single human life. A single life, yeah.
But to be fair, this isn't just a biography.
We're looking at a figure who basically held
a mirror up to the entire 20th century in Italy
and forced it to look at its own reflection.
A very unflattering reflection most of the time.
We are talking about Alberto Moravia. titan i
don't use that word lightly if you walked into
a bookstore in rome in say 1950 or 1970 or even
1990 moravia was just he was the atmosphere you
couldn't escape him but see that's what i want
to get into because when i was prepping for this
i saw the accolades the nobel nominations the
movie deals the you know the political career
all of it the whole package but then i read this
quote from him and it just stopped me cold he
said the two most important facts of his life
were his illness and fascism It's a jarring thing
to say, isn't it? It's not what you expect from
a celebrated artist. Yeah, not at all. He said
they, and I'm quoting here, caused him to suffer
and do things he otherwise would not have done.
And that feels so restrictive. Usually when we
talk about great writers, we talk about their
freedom, their wild lives. Right. Their choices.
Exactly. But Moravia is defining himself by what
trapped him. By his constraints. That is the
perfect entry point. Because you can't understand
a single page of his writing. I mean, not really,
unless you understand that tension. He was a
man compressed. Compressed. I like that. On one
side you have his own body betraying him, the
illness. It's a physical prison. On the other
side you have the state betraying him, fascism,
a political prison. And in that compression chamber,
something crystallized. He used that pressure
to break things, didn't he? He used it to break
open the middle class, to crack the shell of
what he called their moral aridity. Moral aridity.
That is such a dry, dusty phrase. It just sounds
empty. It's meant to be. It's a desert of the
soul. He wasn't interested in the great mustache
twirling villains of history. He was interested
in the people who just didn't care. The indifferent,
the hypocrites, the people who were hollow out
inside but kept up appearances. OK, so our mission
today for this deep dive is to trace that pressure.
How does a kid who was literally stuck in a bed
for five years, missing school, missing his entire
childhood, transform into this calm, insightful,
almost surgical voice of Italian existentialism?
And how does he become a perennial Nobel contender
and someone whose work just translated so perfectly
to the big screen? Right. And to do that, we're.
pulling from everything we can find, biographical
records, publication histories. And critical
analysis of his themes from that existential
dread we mentioned all the way to his very frank
explorations of sexuality. So let's rewind. Let's
go all the way back. 1907, Rome. A baby is born
into a wealthy family, but his name isn't Alberto
Moravio. No, not at all. He was born Alberto
Pintral. Pintral? Pintral. It's a Jewish Venetian
name. His father's name. So Moravia is a pen
name, a pseudonym. It is, yeah. And the reason
for that change is a huge part of the survival
story we'll get to later. But let's stick with
the baby for a second. Alberto Pinchrell. His
family background is this perfect storm of early
20th century European identity. It sounds like
a complex mix just from the names. Oh, it's the
definition of complex. His father, Carlo Pinchrell,
was an architect and a painter. Jewish from Venice,
very cultured, very secular. Okay. His mother,
Teresa Eugenia de Marsanich, was a Catholic from
Ancona, but with Dalmatian origins. So you've
got Jewish and Catholic, Venetian and Dalmatian,
North and East, all under one roof in Rome. Exactly.
But the tension wasn't just religious or cultural.
It became deeply, dangerously political. I mean,
if you look at Moravia's extended family, you
essentially have the entire Italian Civil War
playing out at the dinner table before it even
started. You're kidding. How close were they
to the action? As close as you can possibly get.
On his father's side, his paternal cousins were
Carlo and Nella Rosselli. The name Rosselli.
That definitely rings a bell from history class.
It absolutely should. They are legends of the
Italian resistance. They founded Justizia e Libertà,
Justice and Liberty. Right. They were the intellectual
heavyweights of the anti -fascist movement. They
were so effective, so dangerous to the regime
that Mussolini himself had them hunted down and
murdered in France in 1937. Wow. OK, so that's
the father's side. Martyrs of the anti -fascist
resistance. What about the mother's side? And
then you pivot to the mother's side. His maternal
uncle. was a man named Augusto de Marsanich.
And he was. He wasn't just a member of the fascist
party. He was an undersecretary in the National
Fascist Party cabinet, a government official.
That is just unbelievable. So you have the guys
running the dictatorship and the guys dying to
overthrow it, and they share bloodlines with
this one kid. It perfectly embodies the split
of Italy itself. Moravia is the synthesis of
this national fracture. He's living right in
the middle of the schizophrenia of the 20th century.
But before he even gets old enough to really
understand those politics, that first important
fact of his life hits him. The illness. Yes.
Tuberculosis of the bone. He's nine years old.
1916. I have to pause here. Tuberculosis of the
bone. I know what TB is in the lungs, the coughing,
the blood, all of that. But in the bone, what
does that even mean? It's a bacterial infection
of the skeletal system. In his case, it was coccytis
in the hip. It's incredibly painful, debilitating.
And you have to remember, this is 1916. Antibiotics
aren't a thing yet. There's no quick fix. But
what's the treatment? The only cure was rest.
Absolute, total immobilization. So when we say
bedridden, we don't mean he was just, you know,
resting on the couch watching cartoons or reading
comics. You mean confined. Strapped down. In
some cases, he spent five years in bed, three
of those years at home, and then two years in
a sanatorium up in the mountains, the Cotevilla
Institute near Cortina d 'Ampezzo. Five years
from age nine to 14. That is that's the whole
ballgame for a kid. That's when you learn to
socialize. That's when you learn to play sports.
That's when you figure out who you are in the
world. And he missed all of it. He was completely
cut off while other kids were running around
the piazzas of Rome, scraping their knees and,
you know, stealing apples. Alberta was staring
at a white ceiling. Or looking out a window at
a world he couldn't touch. What does that do
to a developing brain? To your whole way of seeing
things? It changes the wiring completely. This
is where the intellectual incubation happens.
He didn't go to school. He didn't have teachers
telling him what to read, what to think. He just
had time. He had a lot of time and he had a lot
of books. What was on the reading list for this?
10, 11 year old? Everything. But not kids stuff.
He was devouring Dostoevsky, Joyce, Goldoni,
Shakespeare, Moliere, Gogol, the heaviest hitters
of the European canon. He was learning French
and German on his own just so he could read more.
He was writing poems in French when he was 12
years old. It's an incredible story of resilience,
but it's also just so lonely. The isolation must
have been profound. It's profoundly lonely. And
this is the absolute key to understanding his
writing style later in life. When you spend five
formative years watching the world from a distance,
unable to participate, you stop being a participant.
You become a voyeur. A voyeur. An observer. Yes.
You learn to observe. You learn to detach. You
watch the way the nurse walks across the room,
the way the doctor holds his pen, the way the
afternoon light hits the wall. You analyze people
because you can't interact with them. So that
cold, precise style that critics always talk
about with Moravia. It wasn't a stylistic choice
he made in a writer's workshop. He was forged
in that sanatorium bed. It was his survival mechanism.
He was dissecting the world because he couldn't
join it. Precisely. He was the boy who looks,
and eventually he became the man who looks, which
is not coincidentally the title of one of his
later books. But it all starts there, in that
bed. So he finally gets released. He's about
18 years old. He's physically healed for the
most part, but he has a limp for the rest of
his life. He's missed his entire adolescence.
He moves to a town called Bressanone to do one
thing. Yeah. Right. And he produces something
that just explodes onto the scene. He writes
Glee Indifferenti, which translates to Time of
Indifference. And he's how old when he writes
this? He starts it when he's around 18. It gets
published when he's 21. The year is 1929. 21
years old, most 21 year olds are trying to figure
out how to do their own laundry. He writes a
foundational masterpiece of European literature.
And he had to pay for it himself. It wasn't like
publishers were banging down his door. He was
an unknown kid. He paid 5 ,000 Italian lira of
his own money, well, his father's money, to get
it printed. It was a massive gamble. So let's
dig into this book, Glee Indifferenti, because
the title sounds... Well, indifferent, a bit
boring even. But the book is not about people
who are just chill or laid back. No, not at all.
It's a horror story in a way, a quiet horror
story. It's this brutally realistic analysis
of a middle class Roman family, a mother and
her two adult children. And they are rotting
from the inside out. Rotting how? What's the
decay? Morally. The mother is desperately clinging
to a lover, a sleazy businessman named Leo. Not
because she loves him, but because she's terrified
of losing her social status and her villa. The
daughter, Carla, knows Leo is awful. He actually
propositions her, tries to seduce her, but she's
completely passive. She just goes along with
it. And the sun. There's a sun, right? Yes, Michelle.
He's the center of the book. He sees all this
hypocrisy. He sees the rot. And he wants to be
angry. He wants to have this grand, tragic, noble
rage against it all. But he can't feel it. He
can't feel it. That's the indifference. It's
not that he doesn't care. It's that he is paralyzed.
He's numb. He tries to kill the lover at one
point to make this grand gesture. But he forgets
to load the gun. Oh, that's brutal. It's not
just tragic. It's pathetic. It's pathetic. It's
a complete failure of will. And that is such
a savage critique. You have to remember the context.
This is 1929. This is the height of Mussolini's
power. Right. And fascism is selling a very different
story. Exactly. Think about what fascism was
selling. It was selling vitality, action, strength,
the Roman Empire reborn, youth, energy. And here
comes this sick kid fresh out of the sanatorium
with his quiet devastating novel that says actually
look at us we're dead inside we were powered
by inertia and greed and boredom that must have
gone over like a lead balloon with the regime
it was a shock but the literary critics at least
initially couldn't ignore it it was too good
too new it was hailed as the start of a new contemporary
narrative but the fascists they took note This
pintual kid was a problem. And this starts the
cat and mouse game. It does. Moravia's relationship
with the regime from that point on was a slow
motion collision. They didn't arrest him immediately.
They were more subtle. They just started to erase
him. Erase him how? Well, in 1935, he publishes
his next major novel, L 'Ambizione Spadiate,
or Mistaken Ambitions. The Ministry of Popular
Culture, the MinColPOP as it was known, sends
out a quiet directive to all the newspapers.
No reviews. No reviews at all. None. You are
prohibited from talking about this book. It's
almost worse than an outright ban. It's just
silencing. They're making him a non -person.
And it gets worse from there. It gets much more
aggressive. In 1941, they seize his novel, La
Mascarata, which means masquerade. Later that
year, they ban Agostino. He's being systematically
suffocated as a writer. So how does a writer
survive that? If you can't write about the reality
you see, what do you write? You write in code.
You find another way. Moravia started experimenting
with surrealism, with allegory. He wrote works
like Is Sonio del Pigro the Dream of the Lazy?
He was trying to smuggle his ideas about conformity
and moral decay past the censors by dressing
them up in strange, fantastical costumes. And
he had to dress up his name, too, as you mentioned.
Yes. This is where the name Pinterlo became a
serious liability. The anti -Semitic racial laws
were passed in 1938. Being a prominent writer
with a Jewish surname was dangerous, so he leaned
fully into the pseudonym Moravia, which came
from his paternal grandmother's side. It was
another survival tactic. It's terrifying to think
about. He's trying to keep his career alive,
but he's also just trying to keep his body alive.
Yeah. And then 1943 hits. The turning point for
all of Italy, and for Moravia personally, the
armistice, September 8th. The king flees, the
government collapses, and the Nazis occupy Rome.
The Civil War explodes. It is no longer safe
to be Alberto Moravia, the known anti -fascist
writer in Rome. He's with his wife at this point,
right? Elsa Morante. Yes, he married Elsa Morante
in 1941. And we should do a whole other deep
dive on her because she is a literary giant in
her own right. Another time. So they're a known
quantity. They're a known quantity. They were
living in Capri trying to stay low. But when
the Nazis march into Rome, they know they're
on a list. They have to run. Where do you even
go in that situation? They try to head south
toward the approaching Allied lines. But they
get stuck. They end up hiding in a small town
called Fondi in the mountainous region of Chiociaria.
And this is not a villa in Tuscany we're talking
about. No. This is peasant country. It's rough.
Mountains, mud, extreme poverty. They lived in
what was essentially a hut with a family of shepherds
for... Nine months. And this brings us to the
second massive shift in his life. We talked about
the illness stripping away his childhood. What
did this experience in Fondy strip away? It stripped
away the bourgeois intellectual bubble. Completely.
Up until this point, Moravia is writing about
the middle class from the middle class. He's
critiquing the drawing rooms and the villas.
In Fundy, he's starving. He's cold. He's seeing
raw survival. He's seeing the violence of war
up close, not as a concept, but as a daily reality.
He's seeing what people do when moral aridity
isn't the problem. Starvation is the problem.
Exactly. And this experience birthed his return
to realism, but a coarser, earthier, more visceral
realism. This is the seed for what many consider
his greatest novel, La Ciosciara. Which we know
in English as Two Women. Right. It was published
much later, in 1957. But the DNA is all from
those nine months in 1943 and 44. Let's talk
about that book. It's the story of a mother,
Cicera, and her daughter, Rosetta. They're shopkeepers
from Rome who flee to the countryside, to Cicera,
thinking they're escaping a war. But of course,
the war finds them. It always does. It's a devastating
book. The ending is, it's just brutal. It is.
The scene in the church where they are both raped
by Moroccan colonial troops fighting for the
French army, so -called liberators, it is one
of the most harrowing sequences in all of Italian
literature. It symbolizes the total destruction
of innocence. The daughter, Rosetta, she goes
from this angelic religious girl to... something
else entirely. She becomes numb. She shuts down.
She becomes promiscuous. It's like the trauma
just burned out her soul. Numb. There's that
theme again, that paralysis. Yes, but it's a
different kind of numbness than in Glee and Differente.
In the first book, the numbness came from boredom
and hypocrisy, from a life without meaning. In
Two Women, the numbness comes from trauma. It's
a survival mechanism. It's what happens when
reality is too horrible to feel. So Moravia returns
to Rome in May 1944 after the liberation. He
survives. He survives. And he hits the ground
running. He walks into the offices of Il Corriere
della Sera, the biggest paper in Italy, and basically
says, I'm back, and starts writing. He becomes
a fixture of post -war Italian culture. And the
novels just start pouring out of him. This is
his golden run, really. It is. You get La Romana,
The Woman of Rome in 1947, La Disobedienza, Disobedience
in 1948, and then in 1951. you get maybe his
most politically important novel, Il Conformista.
The Conformist. Okay, I want to spend some time
here because to me, this book explains the psychology
of the 20th century better than most history
books. I completely agree. It's an anti -fascist
novel, but it's not about politics in the way
you'd expect. It's not about marches and speeches.
It's about psychology. It's a character study.
It's about a guy, Marcello Clarici, and his entire
life is driven by one single desperate obsession
to be normal. That's the entire hook. Yeah. Marcello
feels broken inside. He has a trauma from his
childhood. He thinks he killed a man who tried
to molest him. And because of this, he feels
different, abnormal, guilty, and his entire adult
life because a desperate attempt to blend in,
to be just like everyone else. And in Mussolini's
Italy, being just like everyone else means being
a fascist. Bingo. He doesn't join the fascist
party because he believes in the ideology. He
couldn't care less. He joins because it's the
ultimate camouflage. It's the definition of normal.
He marries a boring, conventional, middle -class
woman, not because he loves her, but because
she's normal. And he agrees to work for the secret
police. He agrees to go on a mission to assassinate
his old professor in Paris. Not because he hates
the professor, but because that's what the state,
the normal, asked him to do. It's the price of
admission to the club of normality. It's terrifying
because it suggests that the greatest evils aren't
always committed out of passionate hatred. Sometimes
evil is just about wanting to fit in. It's Hannah
Arndt's banality of evil, localized in one man's
psyche. It's the desire not to stand out. And
this book, The Conformist, brings us to a huge
part of Moravia's legacy. You simply cannot talk
about Moravia without talking about the movies.
It feels like every great Italian director in
that era had a Moravia paperback in their back
pocket. They absolutely did. And non -Italian
ones, too. His work was foundational. Bernardo
Bertolucci adapted The Conformist in 1970. And
if you haven't seen that film, you have to. Pause
this and go watch it. It is visually one of the
most stunning films ever made. It really is.
But why? What is it about Moravia's writing that
makes it so cinematic? I think it goes all the
way back to the illness, to the voyeurism. Moravia
didn't write deeply internal stream of consciousness
mush. He wrote scenes. He described physical
space. He described where people stood in a room.
He described the light coming through the blinds.
He described the objects on a table. He wrote
as if he was describing a stage set. He was a
camera before. Or the camera was even there.
He was writing the screenplay. Exactly. He gave
directors a visual and psychological roadmap.
Look at two women. Victoria De Sica filmed that
in 1960. Sophia Loren won the Oscar for Best
Actress for her role as Sazira. A non -English
language role, which was a huge deal. A huge
deal. She brought that earthy, fierce, traumatized
mother figure to life in a way that was just...
Unforgettable. And then there's Contempt. The
French title is Le Mépris. The Italian is Il
Disprezzo. Filmed by the great Jean -Luc Godard
in 1963 with Brigitte Bardot and Jack Palance.
This movie is iconic. The primary colors, the
music, that amazing apartment scene. But the
story itself. It's painful. It's the complete
disintegration of a marriage between a screenwriter
and his wife. And again, it's about that glass
wall. Yeah. The husband and wife are in the same
room, but they're psychologically miles apart.
They can't communicate. There's that famous scene
from the book in the film where the wife is lying
naked on the bed and asks the husband if he likes
her feet, her ankles, her knees, her thighs.
It's like she's checking an inventory, a list
of parts. Yes. It fragments the body. It's not,
do you love me? It's, do you like these component
parts of me? It emphasizes the alienation. The
husband loves the parts, maybe, but he has lost
the person. That is pure Moravia. It's brutal.
The title says it all. Contempt. We keep hitting
this word, alienation. And we touched on the
word indifference, but there's another critical
word in his vocabulary we need to unpack. The
Italian word is noia. La noia. It usually translates
to boredom. But when I say I'm bored, I mean
there's nothing good on Netflix. Moravia means
something much deeper, doesn't he? He means something
totally different. In 1960, he publishes the
novel La Noya. And for Moravia, boredom isn't
a lack of stimulus. It's a philosophical condition.
It's a disease of perception. Okay, break that
down for us. What does that mean? Okay, so imagine
you are looking at a coffee cup on your desk.
You know it's a coffee cup. You can pick it up.
You can use it. But suddenly it feels... It feels
like there's a thin sheet of glass between you
and the cup. You can't truly connect with it.
You can't find meaning in it. It's just an object.
Its reality has evaporated. So noia is the loss
of connection to reality. It's the interruption
of the relationship between the subject, which
is you, and the object, which is the world. It's
not that you have nothing to do. It's that nothing
you do feels real or meaningful. That actually
sounds incredibly modern. That feels very 21st
century. It is. Think about doom scrolling on
your phone. Yeah. You're looking at hundreds
of videos, images, people, but you feel nothing.
You are completely disconnected. That is Noya.
You are watching life, but you aren't participating
in it. So in the book La Noya, the protagonist
is a rich painter who stops painting. He stops
painting because he can't connect to reality
anymore. The objects he tries to paint feel fake,
meaningless. The Noya has taken over. And so
he tries to solve it through sex. Right. He starts
this intense, troubled relationship with a young
model named Cecilia. He thinks if he can possess
her sexually, he can control her. He can break
through that glass wall. He can grab onto something
real again. And does it work? Of course not.
Because she is completely elusive. The more he
tries to possess her and understand her, the
more she slips away. The sex becomes mechanical,
desperate, obsessive. It just becomes another
form of boredom. Fabio was pretty explicit about
sex in his novels, wasn't he? Especially for
the time. He was, yeah. And this shocked a lot
of people. The Vatican put his books on the Index
of Forbidden Books. But he wasn't writing erotica.
He was writing about sex as a diagnostic tool.
A diagnostic tool. He used it to reveal character.
He saw sex as a desperate attempt to communicate
when all other forms of communication had failed.
He stripped the romance out of it completely.
He showed sex as a transaction or a battleground
for power or just a frantic, physical way to
prove you still exist. It's that surgical style
again. The cold, precise scalpel. A surgical
report on the human soul. That's a good way to
put it. He uses simple words. He doesn't use
flowery adjectives or complicated syntax. He
cuts straight to the bone. Now, despite all this
talk of boredom and alienation and being trapped,
Moravia himself wasn't a hermit. He was a constant
traveler. He was always on the move. I think
in a way he was running from the Noya. He needed
new realities to look at, new societies to dissect.
Where did he go? Everywhere. He went to China,
Japan and Korea in 1967. He traveled extensively
through Africa. An Italian existentialist in
Mao's China during the Cultural Revolution. That's
a very weird image. He wrote a fascinating book
about it, The Red Book and The Great Wall. He
wasn't necessarily endorsing it, but he was fascinated
by the social mechanism, by this attempt to engineer
a new human being. He was always the analyst.
And he went to Japan, to Hiroshima. Yes, that
trip in 1982 really shook him. He wrote a collection
of essays called Inverno Nucleo, the nuclear
winter. He realized that the ultimate alienation,
the ultimate expression of Noya, was the atomic
bomb. The bomb makes all human endeavor, all
history. All meaning, instantly meaningless.
It was the ultimate absurdity. He also got involved
in politics back home, like actual elected office.
Yes, which is surprising for a man so concerned
with detachment. In 1984, he ran for and was
elected to the European Parliament. Which party
did he represent? He ran as an independent on
the list of the Italian Communist Party. Wait,
was he a communist? After everything with fascism?
It's complicated. He was always a leftist, but
he was never a dogmatist. He was wealthy. He
was bourgeois to his core. But he aligned with
the communists because in post -war Italy, he
saw them as the only serious opposition to the
moral aridity of capitalism and the lingering
shadows of fascism. But he was always a critic.
He had a famous quote about that, didn't he?
He did. He said, a writer survives in spite of
his beliefs. Meaning what? Meaning his art had
to come first. His loyalty was to the truth of
his characters, not to a party line. He couldn't
write propaganda. If a story demanded that a
communist character be a hypocrite, he wrote
him as a hypocrite. His honesty as a writer trumped
any political affiliation. We should touch on
his personal life again in this later period
because it was, let's say, unconventional. It
was. He and Elsa Morante separated in 1962. They
were two massive artistic personalities, probably
too big for one house. But interestingly, they
never divorced. They remained legally married
until her death. And then he began a long relationship
with Dacia Moreni. Another incredible writer
and feminist intellectual. They were the literary
power couple of the 60s and 70s in Rome. They
founded a theater company together called Il
Porco Spino, The Porcupine. And then, late in
life, there's another plot twist. In 1986, when
he's almost 80, he gets married again. to a Spanish
woman named Carmen Guerra. She was 45 years his
junior. 45 years. The tabloids in Italy went
absolutely crazy. Yeah. But Moravia, true to
form, didn't care. He never cared about social
convention. I mean, this is the guy who wrote
the book on indifference to social norms. He
lived it. Speaking of not caring about norms,
we have to talk about his 1971 novel, Io Illus.
Yes. I and he, or in English, the two of us.
book okay how do we even describe this it's written
as a dialogue it is a dialogue it's a running
conversation between a struggling screenwriter
named rico and well his penis his independent
talking penis yes the penis has its own voice
it has its own name in a way. It has opinions.
It wants things, usually sex, that Rico, the
intellectual, doesn't want. It constantly undermines
him. It sounds like a premise for a cheap comedy,
but it's actually serious philosophy, right?
It is. I mean, it's funny, yes. It's surreal
and absurd, but it's Moravia grappling with the
ultimate split. The split between the intellect,
the head, and the instinct, the body. The head
wants to be a serious artist and intellectual.
The body just wants to chase women. So who is
really in charge? Who is the I in I and he? He's
basically saying we are not the masters of our
own house. Not even close. There's a civil war
happening inside all of us. Even in his 60s and
70s, he was still experimenting. He never got
safe. He never retired into being a grand old
man of letters. Never. Lo amo que guarda. The
man who looks in 1985 returns to that core voyeur
theme. He just kept picking at the same stab
sex, alienation, the act of looking until the
very end. He was relentless in his obsessions.
But there is one thing he never got. The big
prize, the Nobel Prize in literature. The Nobel
that never was. It's one of the great mysteries.
He was nominated for the Nobel Prize 13 times
between 1949 and 1965 alone. We know this from
the official archives that have been open. 19
times. So why didn't he win? Who really knows
how the Swedish Academy thinks? Maybe he was
too controversial. Maybe his focus on sexuality
was too much for them. Maybe he was seen as too
popular or too cinematic. Maybe they didn't like
the Talking Penis book. It's possible. But honestly,
at the end of the day, he didn't need it. He
was president of PN International. In 1985, he
was officially named European Personality. He
was bigger than the prize. And he kept working
right up to the very end. Right to the end. September
1990. He was found in the bathroom of his apartment
in Rome on the Lunga Tever, overlooking the river.
He was 82 years old. His autobiography, Vita
di Moravia, was published in that same year.
He finished the job. So let's zoom out. We've
gone from the sickbed in Rome to the European
Parliament, from the fascist censors to the international
bestseller list and Oscar winning films. It's
a massive, massive arc. But if we have to distill
it, if we have to answer the question. What did
Alberto Moravia teach us? What is his core message?
I think he taught us to look at the glass. Glass.
The glass wall that he felt separates us from
reality. He showed us that our boredom, our inability
to connect, our feeling of being fake or performing
a role, these are just personal failings. They
are symptoms of the modern world we built. And
he taught us about constraints. That's where
we started. Yes. Go back to that very first quote.
The two most important facts of his life. Illness
and fascism. The things that trapped him. He
believed we are formed by what we are forced
to do, not by what we choose to do. And that
is such a provocative thought for us today. We
live in an age that celebrates limitless choice.
We curate our lives, our jobs, our online identities.
We think we are completely free. But Moravia
would ask, are you? Or are you really being shaped
by the things you can't control? Your health.
The economy. The political climate, the technology
you use. And if you stop distracting yourself
for one second, if you put down the phone, do
you feel that noia creeping in? That silence,
that terrifying silence where you realize you
might not be as connected as you think. That's
the scary part. But Moravia would say, feel it.
Don't run from the boredom. Don't swipe it away.
Look at it. Analyze it. Because that's where
the truth is. Underneath the performance. So
if you, the listener, want to shatter that glass
or at least peek through it, pick up The Conformist
or Time of Indifference or watch Bertolucci's
film or Two Women, it's not always a comfortable
experience. but it is a real one. And in a world
of fake news and filtered photos and curated
realities, a little bit of cold, hard, unblinking
reality is exactly what we need. Thank you for
this incredible journey through his life and
work. My pleasure. It was fascinating. And thank
you all for listening. Keep looking. We'll see
you next time on The Deep Dive.