The writer Corrado Alvaro was born in San Luca in 1895, a small village on the Ionian side of Calabria, at the foot of the Aspromonte Mountains—places that provide the backdrop for his most famous work, Gente in Aspromonte (1930).
The eldest of six children, his childhood was peaceful, and his father oversaw his education until 1906, when, recognizing his son’s talents, he decided to enroll him in a renowned Jesuit college near Frascati, famous for its classical tradition. This early exposure to humanistic culture perhaps planted the seeds of literary passion that Alvaro would cultivate throughout his life.
His passion for poetry drove him to break his silence and begin writing his first stories and verses. However, it also led to his expulsion after being caught reading texts banned by the Catholic Church, such as Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Intermezzo di Rime and Giosuè Carducci’s Inno a Satana. Expelled from the college, he was forced to complete his secondary education elsewhere, moving from Villa Mondragone to a school in the province of Terni and later enrolling at the Galluppi high school in Catanzaro. That same year, he debuted with a booklet titled Polsi nell’Arte, nella Leggenda e nella Storia, dedicated to his mother and signed “Corrado Alvaro. High School Student.”
As soon as he came of age, Alvaro began travelling across Italy but only had time to visit Rome and Florence before Italy entered World War I. He joined the army and was assigned to a regiment in Perugia. Wounded near San Michele del Carso, he returned to Rome in September 1916, where he began contributing to Il Resto del Carlino and eventually became an editor, which led to a move to Bologna. His journalistic career progressed: in 1919, he moved to Milan to collaborate with Corriere della Sera while earning a degree in literature at the University of Milan. In 1921, he became the Paris correspondent for Giovanni Amendola’s Il Mondo. In Paris, Alvaro met writers such as Jacques Rivière and read Marcel Proust, becoming the first to translate a brief passage of Proust’s work into Italian.
During the rise of the Fascist regime, Alvaro signed Benedetto Croce’s Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals in 1925. His vocal opposition led to both a direct assault on him and his inclusion on blacklists that barred him from publishing in newspapers. La Stampa offered him the option to publish anonymously, but this arrangement was short-lived. Alvaro, unwilling to leave Italy, resisted offers from friends to relocate to Paris. In the meantime, he ventured into prose with the experimental novel L’Uomo nel Labirinto (1926), reflecting the stylistic influence of the refined literary circles of Solaria, a Florentine literary magazine directed by Carocci.
In 1928, however, Alvaro was forced to move to Berlin to continue working. There, he met Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Walter Benjamin, and Bertolt Brecht, whose The Threepenny Opera he translated with Alberto Spaini. Perhaps inspired by these encounters, Alvaro published the well-received short story collection L’Amata alla Finestra in 1929, although the regime continued to hinder his work.
In 1930, he returned to Italy and published his most famous book, Gente in Aspromonte, that same year. This novella blends a realistic depiction of peasant life in the harsh Calabrian lands with a nostalgic evocation of an archaic, mythical world. While it carries a strong social commitment, the predominant tone is lyrical and magical, reinterpreting naturalistic styles through the lens of modern European literary experiences. During these years, renewed friendships with Luigi Pirandello and Margherita Sarfatti allowed him to coexist with the regime and moderate his criticism of fascism. He openly resumed his collaboration with La Stampa, working as a correspondent and producing numerous travel volumes that brought him almost as much recognition as his novels.
After World War II, Alvaro continued his dual career as a journalist and writer. He became the director of the national Giornale Radio for RAI, maintained his collaboration with Corriere della Sera, founded the National Writers’ Union, and won the Strega Prize in 1951 with Quasi Una Vita, an intellectual and private diary. During this period, he published travel reports, a narrative trilogy set in Calabria (Memorie del Mondo Sommerso), the fantastical novel Belmoro (posthumously published in 1957), as well as short stories and plays. Alvaro excelled in shorter forms, including short stories, travel notes, and intimate diaries. His writing, grounded in realism and southern Italian tradition, embraced imagination and the mythical, straddling the line between narrative and evocative prose, where atmospheres often overshadow situations. Suffering from cancer, he died in Rome in 1956.
One of Alvaro’s travelogues connects him to the Maremma: Itinerario Italiano (1933). The reportage genre, familiar to writers of the 1930s like Ojetti, Comisso, and Gadda, suited him well. As a correspondent for La Stampa, Alvaro traveled extensively in Italy and abroad, chronicling his journeys in works such as Viaggio in Turchia (1932), Itinerario Italiano (1933), and I Maestri del Diluvio. Viaggio in Russia (1935).
In Itinerario Italiano, Alvaro recounts his travels through Italy’s provincial roads—from the Po Delta to the Maremma, Abruzzo, Naples, and Calabria. One stop includes Monte Argentario, where he explores the lives of its quintessential workers: the fishermen of Porto Santo Stefano. Their words—particularly those of Loffredo, owner of the fishing boat Montargentaro—reveal the contradictions of a timeless trade, whose risks remain despite technological advances, like the boat’s 120-horsepower engine, emphasising survival over mere livelihood.
Every sea has its currents, dangers, safe harbours, and a unique catch, shaping the cultures of those who depend on it. This connection between fishermen and their environment drives Alvaro’s portrayal of the Maremma and Monte Argentario. By highlighting this symbiosis, he conveys the authenticity of their story, allowing readers a glimpse into their intimate world. He contextualises humanity’s shift to the sea, driven in the Grosseto region by a phylloxera plague that destroyed vineyards, forcing many into fishing to survive. Among Porto Ercole’s fishermen, fear of the sea’s perils seemed to have calmed over time. This is evident in Sabatino Ferdinando, a head fisherman who tirelessly endures rough seas until his catch covers expenses, navigating challenges with remarkable composure and familiarity.
The special relationship between the men in this brief story and the sea is shared by the Maremma itself, which is described not through its inland areas but in this context as if its connection to the Tyrrhenian Sea mattered more. Alvaro himself hints at this by describing it as follows: “Spread across the land like a satellite of nearby Elba, and distant Corsica and Sardinia, lies the vast expanse of Maremma.”
The fishermen are portrayed as strong, generous, and daring men, ready to make sacrifices to bring home at least “fifteen hundred kilos” of fish. Onboard, they are all blood relatives, even the newest arrival, whose traditional duty is to feed his companions rather than fish. Their intimacy fosters a simple generosity rooted in a primal ability to coexist, far removed from the contrived sophistication of worldly education. An example of this is seen in the detail about tobacco: “(the captain) rolled himself a cigarette from a pouch of cut tobacco I had just seen on the table, which the crew had all dipped into as if it were a common supply.” They live in close physical proximity, jostling and bumping into each other during rough seas. Beyond physical closeness, their mental bond allows them to coexist naturally, like a pack sharing a single destiny.
What is Alvaro’s critical perspective? How does his narrative stand out from an ordinary account of a day at sea? Through the detachment inherent to the reportage style, which emphasises the gap between the observing eye and the observed subject, the writer reveals the difference between the fishermen and a bourgeois outsider like himself in their relationship with the sea. In Alvaro’s style, the descriptions of the maritime events he witnesses appear as impressions; unfamiliar with the sea, his senses perceive reality as almost romantic images, adorned with mysticism born of his lack of knowledge. When the narrator leaves the fishing boat, it is because he is unwilling to face two more days of even rougher seas. This makes the irretrievable distance between his world—much closer to ours—and the far more natural and combative world of the fishermen of Porto Ercole unmistakably clear.
Yet, something of the mindset of those 1933 fishermen remains today—the concern for the future of the land that feeds and shelters us. Alvaro writes: “Imagine,” the head fisherman Sabatino told me, “the other day, when you were supposed to come with us, we pulled up the nets with a heavy load. They were blocks of asphalt from some ship that had dumped its cargo.” But it’s not just about pollution; it’s also about preserving local traditions and maintaining a positive relationship with them. Alvaro’s fishermen wonder whether fishing with such large nets—so large they overturn the seabeds—might be dangerous. Similarly, they notice that in their waters, the fish are now small and don’t have time to reach adulthood. Perhaps, by no longer living in direct contact with the reality of our land, we have forgotten the importance of caring for it so that it can sustain us. Let this story then be a message in a bottle, found in a Maremma port—a subconscious warning, read to remind us to take care of our sea.