Andrea Bajani, a winner of Italy’s most prestigious literary prize, was back in Rome for the summer when he slid into a seat in front of a weeping woman on a local bus. Like any good novelist, he eavesdropped.
The young woman was arguing with her father on the phone about an apartment she had rented with a roommate in Paris, where she would be attending university. Mr. Bajani discerned that the father wanted her to allocate a spare room for her parents to visit regularly. “This can’t be the only obsession you guys have,” Mr. Bajani heard her protest through tears.
To Mr. Bajani, 51, the overheard exchange represented a clblockic Italian family trope involving infinitely demanding parents and the children who struggle to break free of them. It is a dynamic he explores in his best-selling novel of family estrangement, “The Anniversary,” which will be published in an English translation on Aug. 25 in the United States.
“The family in Italy is kind of an institution that comes before the state,” said Mr. Bajani, whose latest work exposes the physical and psychological violence that can rot a family from within. “There’s this idea that is very much Italian,” he said in an interview at the American Academy in Rome, where he was once a fellow: Families are “these little totalitarian systems.”
“The Anniversary” — told from the point of view of a 40-something narrator who has not seen his dictatorial father or self-abnegating mother for a decade, a period he describes as “the best 10 years of my life” — has resonated deeply with readers in Italy. It won the Strega Prize for prose fiction in 2025 and was the highest-selling literary novel in Italy last year — and the eighth-best-selling book overall.
At public appearances, readers have besieged Mr. Bajani to tell him, “‘Oh, this is the story of my family,’” he said.
Reviewers have praised Mr. Bajani for writing the unsayable as he upends clichés about close, loving Italian families and protective, affectionate mothers. “A book must be an ax that shatters the frozen sea within us, and that’s precisely what Bajani’s book has done,” Annalena Benini, a culture writer and book critic for Il Foglio, a newspaper in Rome, said in an interview. “That act of digging, digging deep, uncovering the truth, has been highly appreciated.”
In Italy, family is not simply a private matter. Giorgia Meloni, the right-leaning prime minister, campaigned on a platform that included the slogan “God, homeland, family.” At a time when Italy’s birthrate is declining, she has condemned those who “have affirmed that parenthood is an archaic and patriarchal concept.”
Yet there has been little backlash against Mr. Bajani’s portrayal of a patriarchal, abusive father and his cowering family, which has connected with many readers. Government statistics show that one in eight Italian women have been the victims of physical violence by a partner and nearly one in five report psychological violence.
“There’s nothing exceptional about this compared to many traditional Italian families,” Mario De Santis, a poet and journalist who reviewed “The Anniversary” for Minima et Moralia, an online literary magazine, said in an interview.
Mr. Bajani said he had originally considered writing the narrator as female, but decided he had to be male. The character undergoes intense psychotherapy and eventually becomes a father himself. “I wanted a man who would reject the inheritance of the patriarchal man,” he said. “Who would say, as a man, that he doesn’t want that.”
The narrator, who leaves Italy for stints abroad in part to escape his toxic family, believes similar motivations help explain why Italy is among the European countries that send the most workers abroad.
A key “Italian ‘export,’” the narrator writes, is “hundreds of thousands” of adult children who “have asked the planet, its curvature and time zones, to protect them, distance them, save them from the ones who brought them into the world.”
Mr. Bajani, who currently teaches creative writing at Rice University in Houston, where he lives with his American wife and two children, declined to discuss any personal parallels with his fiction. Instead, he talked about the “absolute power” exerted by Italian families, particularly by domineering fathers, whose behavior might be enabled by Catholic beliefs, including “the idea that people owe everything to their parents: ‘Honor the father and the mother.’”
Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied the Italian brain drain, said lack of economic opportunity at home is most likely the biggest impetus for Italians to leave their homeland.
Still, he said he “wouldn’t discount completely” Mr. Bajani’s explanation. Some adult children might find it difficult to exert their independence because of “a very distinctive Italian cultural attitude: parents really like having children under their wings.”
Last year, 69 percent of Italian 18- to 34-year-olds lived with their parents, compared with 50 percent across the European Union, E.U. data shows. Rather than fleeing abuse, Mr. Moretti said, some Italians who move away may be trying to distance themselves from “a controlling or overbearing family.”
Mr. Bajani, like the narrator of “The Anniversary,” was born in Rome but moved during his childhood to northern Italy. He said his impulse to write came from a desire to blend art and politics, though he grew up in a generation that was told not to focus on politics because the great problems of the era had been resolved by the end of the Cold War.
“The idea of revolution, not only a Communist revolution, a leftist revolution, but the idea of a revolution, didn’t exist,” he said.
As a teenager, he said, he became obsessed with the Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini — murdered in 1975, the year Mr. Bajani was born — whose radical politics and artistic advocacy for people who lived on the fringes of society fueled Mr. Bajani’s own emerging political consciousness.
After college, he took a job in a publishing house and then became a radio news reader. When he was 30, after writing two small books issued by independent presses, he published his first novel with a larger publisher, “Cordiali Saluti” (“Best Regards”), written as a series of letters from a corporate downsizer to the son of a fired worker. Its success allowed Mr. Bajani to quit his job at the radio station to focus on writing.
He has published nine novels, a volume of short stories and three collections of poetry, often touching on the theme of family dysfunction and estrangement.
But when he moved to Texas in 2020 and began spending his days speaking and teaching in English, it changed the way he thought and wrote, even in Italian, he said. He composed a draft of “The Anniversary” in just 20 days and then spent the next three years revising it. He joked that the novel, which is a slim 128 pages in Italian, “would have been 538 pages and never gotten to the point” if he had written it before moving to the United States.
Mr. Bajani said that when he read the English translation, by Geoffrey Brock, a poet and professor of creative writing at the University of Arkansas, he felt it came closer to the heart of what he was trying to say. “English as a language is kind of giving a new shape to my meaning,” Mr. Bajani said.
Mr. Brock said he was also struck by the narrator’s theory about Italians emigrating to escape their families. Now, he said, he is curious to see how readers in other countries relate to that theme. It may depend, he said, “on the particular idea of family that holds sway in other places.”
Josephine de La Bruyère contributed reporting.
