Guido Artom e "I giorni del mondo"

Abstract

Guido Artom (1910-1982), once director of the Italian Culture Institute in Brussels, writer of several books with a 19th century French (often of Napoleonic or of Belgian) background, and a novel on the theft of two paintings by the Van Eyck brothers in Gent, has written on the end of his life a book in which he turns to his Jewish background. The principal characters of the novel are his ancestors Zaccaria and Raffaele. Their personal history, presented into some detail and not without humour, coincides with that of Jewish emancipation in Cavour’s Risorgimento. Impressive is the autobiographic chapter at the novel’s beginning where the author during a visit to his family home reflects on his position as a Jew in the middle of Roman Catholic Italian culture.