La natività di Alberto Moravia tra «realismo magico» e «irrealtà quotidiana»
Alberto Moravia’s La natività between «Magic Realism» and «Daily Unreality»

Summary/Abstract: This work aims at providing a critical reading of Alberto Moravia’s La natività, a story written in 1929 and republished, under the heading of “unpublished”, in 2015. The paper is structured around this short text because it is one of the most tangible examples of the Todorovian uncertainty, between “reality” and “unreality” that characterizes Moravia’s fantastic narrative production, while he had long been – wrongly – identified as an exclusively realist writer. Our analysis highlights how the origins of La Natività are intrinsically linked to Massimo Bontempelli’s avant-garde experiment, which brings young Moravia closer to magical realism and metaphysical painting. However, the author of La Natività reinterprets in his own way the theoretical principles defined by Bontempelli in “900. Cahiers d’Italie et d’Europe”: pushing the conception of the work of art as an object to extreme, he doesn’t focus on the magical aura that can arise from an objective representation of reality and chooses instead to paint that atmosphere of everyday unreality in which he, like his characters, is forced to live under Fascism.

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