Cesare Pavese

One Poem

You are earth and death. Your season is darkness and silence. No living thing is more remote than you from the dawn. When you appear to wake you are onl... Read more

Cesare Pavese was born in northern Italy in 1908. Exiled by the Fascist regime to Calabria in 1935, Pavese eventually returned to Turin to work for the publishing house Einaudi. Pavese won the Strega Prize for fiction, Italy’s most prestigious literary award, for The Beautiful Summer in 1950. Later the same year, after a brief affair with an American actress, he took his own life. His suicide note reads: ‘I forgive everyone and ask everyone’s forgiveness. O.K.? Don't gossip too much.’