The Road to the City

Synopsis

They say that big families are happy, but I could never see anything particularly happy about ours.

Delia is one of five children, growing up in a poor Italian village. She is seventeen, and dreams of marrying a rich man; she dreams of a grand apartment in the city and silk stockings. To escape her father’s neglect and her mother’s sadness, she begins to take the dusty road to the city every day, accompanied by Nini, her sweet and mysterious cousin.

When Nini takes a job in a factory and moves in with a city woman, Delia sees another way of being. But when she discovers she’s pregnant, she agrees to marry the father, seduced by the promise of wealth and comfort. Nothing, not even Nini’s desperate declaration of love, can stop her – but her rejection will be his undoing.

The Road to the City is a short, poignant novel about the dreams of youth, and the cruelty it takes to make them come true.

Author

One of the most renowned and distinctive voices in postwar Italian literature, Natalia Ginzburg (1916–1991) has been praised for her inimitable style and her unforgettable novels depicting private lives in a disrupted social landscape. A prolific dramatist as well as essayist and novelist, she is best known in this country for her novels All Our Yesterdays, The City and the House, and Voices in the Evening, as well as her autobiographical work The Things We Used to Say, and her biography of the great nineteenth century man of letters Alessandro Manzoni. Ginzburg grew up in Turin and spent most of her adult life in Rome.