WRITER

Alberto Moravia

1907 - 1990

Photo of Alberto Moravia

Icon of person Alberto Moravia

Alberto Pincherle (Italian: [alˈbɛrto ˈpiŋkerle]; 28 November 1907 – 26 September 1990), known by his pseudonym Alberto Moravia (US: moh-RAH-vee-ə, -⁠RAY-, Italian: [moˈraːvja]), was an Italian novelist and journalist. His novels explored matters of modern sexuality, social alienation and existentialism. Moravia is best known for his debut novel Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference 1929) and for the anti-fascist novel Il conformista (The Conformist 1947), the basis for the film The Conformist (1970) directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Alberto Moravia has received more than 527,878 page views. His biography is available in 65 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 64 in 2019). Alberto Moravia is the 285th most popular writer (up from 301st in 2019), the 380th most popular biography from Italy (up from 396th in 2019) and the 23rd most popular Italian Writer.

Alberto Moravia is most famous for his novel "La Ciociara," which tells the story of a woman who is abandoned by her husband and must struggle to provide for her children.

Memorability Metrics

  • 530k

    Page Views (PV)

  • 70.55

    Historical Popularity Index (HPI)

  • 65

    Languages Editions (L)

  • 9.35

    Effective Languages (L*)

  • 3.57

    Coefficient of Variation (CV)

Notable Works

La ciociara
1957
Agostino
1944
Gli indifferenti
1930
Il conformista
1951
La Romana
Italy
The story of Adriana, a simple girl with no fortune but her beauty, who models naked for a painter, accepts gifts from men, and cannot quite identify the moment when she traded her dream of home and children for the life of a prostitute. Set amid the glitter and cynicism of Rome under Mussolini.
19474 / 5
Conjugal love
1951
Gli indifferenti
Triangles (Interpersonal relations), Man-woman relationships, Apathy
1930
Conjugal love
Fiction, Italian fiction, Sexual abstinence
1951
Il conformista
Assassins, Fascism, Fiction
The class requested
1951
Agostino
Fiction, Social life and customs, sex
Thirteen-year-old Agostino is spending the summer at a Tuscan seaside resort with his beautiful widowed mother. When she takes up with a cocksure new companion, Agostino, feeling ignored and unloved, begins hanging around with a group of local young toughs. Though repelled by their squalor and brutality, and repeatedly humiliated for his weakness and ignorance when it comes to women and sex, the boy is increasingly, masochistically drawn to the gang and its rough games. He finds himself unable to make sense of his troubled feelings. Hoping to be full of manly calm, he is instead beset by guilty curiosity and an urgent desire to sever, at any cost, the thread of troubled sensuality that binds him to his mother. Alberto Moravia’s classic, startling portrait of innocence lost was written in 1942 but rejected by Fascist censors and not published until 1944, when it became a best seller and secured the author the first literary prize of his career. Revived here in a new translation by Michael F. Moore, Agostino is poised to captivate a twenty-first-century audience.
1944
La ciociara
Fiction, Mothers and daughters, World War, 1939-1945
"The two women of Alberto Moravia's powerful story are mother and daughter - Cesira, a widowed Roman shopkeeper, and Rosetta, a naive teenager of haunting beauty and devout faith. When the German army prepares to occupy Rome, Cesira packs a few provisions, sews her life savings into the seams of her dress, and flees south with Rosetta to her native province of Ciociara, a poor, mountainous region famous for providing the domestic servants of Rome. For nine months the two women endure hunger, cold, and filth as they await the arrival of the Allied forces.". "But the Liberation, when it comes, brings unexpected tragedy. On their way home the pair are attacked and Rosetta brutally raped by a group of Allied Moroccan soldiers. This act of violence so embitters Rosetta that she falls numbly into a life of prostitution. In his story of two women Moravia offers up an intimate portrayal of the anguish and destruction wrought by war, as devastating behind the lines as it is on the battlefield."--BOOK JACKET.
1957
La Romana
Italian fiction, Fiction, Continental european fiction (fictional works by one author)
The glitter and cynicism of Rome under Mussolini provide the background of what is probably Alberto Moravia’s best and best-known novel — The Woman of Rome. It’s the story of Adriana, a simple girl with no fortune but her beauty who models naked for a painter, accepts gifts from men, and could never quite identify the moment when she traded her private dream of home and children for the life of a prostitute. One of the very few novels of the twentieth century which can be ranked with the work of Dostoevsky, The Woman of Rome also tells the stories of the tortured university student Giacomo, a failed revolutionary who refuses to admit his love for Adriana; of the sinister figure of Astarita, the Secret Police officer obsessed with Adriana; and of the coarse and brutal criminal, Sonzogno, who treats Adriana as his private property. Within this story of passion and betrayal, Moravia calmly strips away the pride and arrogance hiding the corrupt heart of Italian Fascism.
1947

Among WRITERS

Among writers, Alberto Moravia ranks 285 out of 7,302. Before him are Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Paul Heyse, Mary Wollstonecraft, Alfonso X of Castile, and William Golding. After him are Paul Valéry, Philip K. Dick, Marcus Terentius Varro, Gerhart Hauptmann, Emily Dickinson, and Arthur C. Clarke.

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Contemporaries

Among people born in 1907, Alberto Moravia ranks 10. Before him are Katharine Hepburn, Oscar Niemeyer, John Wayne, Edwin McMillan, Mircea Eliade, and J. Hans D. Jensen. After him are Laurence Olivier, Hergé, Yakov Dzhugashvili, Baldur von Schirach, Rachel Carson, and Frank Whittle. Among people deceased in 1990, Alberto Moravia ranks 7. Before him are Rajneesh, Lev Yashin, Greta Garbo, Roald Dahl, Leonard Bernstein, and Louis Althusser. After him are Ava Gardner, B. F. Skinner, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Paulette Goddard, Sarah Vaughan, and Norbert Elias.

Others Born in 1907

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In Italy

Among people born in Italy, Alberto Moravia ranks 380 out of 5,161. Before him are Guido Reni (1575), Antipope John XXIII (1370), Vitus (290), Archytas (-428), Giovanni Domenico Cassini (1625), and Pope Sixtus III (390). After him are Pope Leo IV (790), Marcus Terentius Varro (-116), Nero Claudius Drusus (-38), Cato the Younger (-95), Cesare Maldini (1932), and Tiberius Gracchus (-163).

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Among WRITERS In Italy

Among writers born in Italy, Alberto Moravia ranks 23. Before him are Juvenal (50), Carlo Goldoni (1707), Torquato Tasso (1544), Dario Fo (1926), Sallust (-86), and Primo Levi (1919). After him are Marcus Terentius Varro (-116), Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863), Ludovico Ariosto (1474), Lorenzo Valla (1407), Christine de Pizan (1365), and Ennius (-239).

Italian born Writers

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