A Scandal in Novel Form: The History of the Roman Bank as Novel Plot.

Abstract

The Banca Romana scandal, a still well-known political-judicial affair, which occurred in the late nineteenth century, inspired various books, from some forgotten, but worth reading novels, to Pirandello’s I vecchi e i giovani. The literary representation of this story has a lot of  interesting implications: the tricky relationship between truth and likelihood; the strong influence of some foreign authors (especially Zola) on Italian narrative; the literature’s approach to politics, sometimes radically negative, sometimes more shaded and ambiguous, always totally different from the current one.