Carlo Cassola was born in Rome on March 17, 1917, the youngest of five children. His father, the journalist and translator from Parma, Garzia Cassola, a socialist, had already lived for several years in Grosseto. His mother, Maria Camilla Bianchi, was also of Tuscan origin, from the town of Volterra, which would later be very important to Carlo. Cassola would always say that his childhood was not a happy one, quite the opposite, and that, from a very young age, he had been deeply struck by the fantastic and adventurous stories his father told him about Grosseto and the Maremma Tuscany.

The young writer’s adolescence was very solitary and mostly dedicated to reading. He was enrolled at the Umberto I Classical High School in Rome. After graduation, he enrolled in 1935 at the Faculty of Law at the University of La Sapienza. In his early university years, he founded a group of young antifascists, including Manlio Cancogni, Mario Alicata, Bruno Zevi, and others. In 1939, he graduated with a thesis in Civil Law. He contributed with various texts and short stories to numerous magazines, such as Corrente, IlFrontespizio, and Letteratura. He moved to Volterra to teach, which was also the town of his fiancée and future wife, Rosa. This was also the area where he actively participated in the Resistance, in the Garibaldini brigades, using the code name Giacomo.

After the Liberation, he joined the Action Party and Unità Popolare, and later worked in the editorial offices of La Nazione del popolo, Il Giornale del mattino, and L’Italia socialista. He then moved to Grosseto. The writer would often recall how the small Tuscan city helped him overcome the great crisis of 1949, largely related to the death of his wife, who was only thirty, from a kidney attack. This crisis also led Cassola to write Il taglio del bosco, published in 1950.

Cassola himself recounts the origin and development of that text: “I started it at the end of ’48. It was conceived as a purely existential story, the story, indeed, of a forest being cut down. Five woodcutters go to cut a forest; for several months, they do the same work every day, repeat the same conversations, etc. Here was a magnificent theme for a negative narrative: it allowed me to tell something and, at the same time, tell nothing. Nothing, I mean, that had any particular meaning. The only meaning such a story could have had was purely existential. I had written half of it when an event that shook my life also put my literature in crisis. I grew to hate my past, my aesthetic education, everything I had written up until then; I found monstrous a poetic that isolated the existential emotion, making it the only object of literary expression. So, when a few months later I resumed writing Il taglio del bosco, I kept the existential story of the cutting, but I made it the simple backdrop for a particular feeling, the protagonist’s pain over the death of his wife. The existence of the companions, this existence made of nothing, of daily gestures, of daily conversations, is, for Guglielmo, the mirror of his previous condition, the mirror of his lost happiness.”

It is almost a minimal diary woven with bits of hard work, enriched with daily sequences of cooked food, clothes washed alone; with the only distraction of smoking during rest periods, playing cards, arguing, or closing in long silences during winter vigils; while the relentless cycle of the seasons brings wind, frost, and fog.

The decision to come to Grosseto was perhaps due to his father’s Maremma memories and certainly to his marriage with Beppina Rabagli, with whom he had a daughter, Barbara. The writer taught History and Philosophy at the G. Marconi Scientific High School until 1971. In Grosseto, Cassola would also write some of his most important books, such as Fausto e Anna (1952) and La ragazza di Bube (1960). In Grosseto, there are still former students who remember how often the writer would read and discuss his newly written narrative pages in his classes.

In his later years, Cassola dedicated much of his effort to peace. Notably, he founded the League for the Unilateral Disarmament of Italy, putting much passion and commitment into this cause, but also facing difficulties and intellectual and political ostracism due to his significant involvement in peace efforts. The writer passed away in Montecarlo di Lucca on January 26, 1987.

Cassola writes: “I would say that the Maremma is a land without character. Here, the weight of history is less strong than in the rest of Tuscany. One rarely comes across a monument with artistic value or one that is a testimony of the past. Grosseto has overflowed the Medici walls: but it still looks like a village (a large agricultural consortium, as Gadda once told me). Many were surprised to see me end up in Grosseto (I lived there for about twenty years). They were doubly surprised: because it is a small center and because it is the most anonymous of the Tuscan towns. I had chosen it precisely for this reason, because it was the most anonymous. I didn’t like finding beauty where everyone finds it, but where no one finds it. Let’s say I placed it by myself in all the places where chance had made me live.”